Strateer Blog

Last year in February we attended the first version of O’Reilly’s Money:Tech conference. It was the first time we gathered feedback for Strateer, which we just started a couple of weeks earlier.

This year we will be an exhibitor. Visit us in the Exhibit hall at booth #7 to talk about the need for better tools for the individual investor, Alerts4all, licensing some of our products or whether the stock market will be actually shut down by the end of the year.

Update: Appears that Money:Tech ‘09 has been canceled. There does not seem to be a market for a $2,500 ticket fintech conference right now. Too bad - last years conference was a big success for us.

We just launched two new features for Alerts4all that makes it easier and more exciting to use:

Integrate Alerts4all with your online broker account

We realized that it might be a bit cumbersome to login each time after you bought a position in order to setup your alerts for that position. Now you do not have to login anymore. Just forward your trade confirmation mail to ‘newalert@alerts4all.com’ from that same account that you signed up. We will analyze the email and create your default alerts (you can set these up in your account) for every stock symbol we can find.

Alternatively we have created a unique ‘@alerts4all.com email address’ for you. Look up your address in your account and have your online broker send all trade confirmations to that address. Done - we will automatically monitor your portfolio and you do not have be worried anymore to miss the right time to sell your position.

Streaming Stock Quotes

Wondering what the price is doing right now while editing your alerts? Now we stream all price activity right to your Alerts4all dashboard. We track and display the performance of each stock since you created your first alert for it.

2008 has been a wild ride on the markets. We hope that Alerts4all will make it easier for you to navigate the markets in 2009.

Thank you for using Alerts4all. If you have any questions, need additional alerts or have suggestions on how to improve Alerts4all, please email me at fabian@alerts4all.com

Happy Investing,
Fabian Siegel

When I mention Strateer to people I meet, I often get a surprised look. Starting a company that provides a better way to invest into the stock market seems to be completely insane to people given the current state of the financial markets. People behave as by the end of year there will be nobody left that owns stock. So let’s close the stock market - the last one please switch off the light.

I have a contrarian point of view: There will be still a stock market next year, and as well the year after that. And there will be investors buying and selling stock. There will be even individual investors. And they will have the same problems that they have now: They want to improve their performance and they are still too busy to follow the markets constantly. Furthermore they are non-systematic, emotional and in general should not invest. But they do, some to well and many more could do well.

I would conclude that therefore there will be retail brokerage firms in the years to come that service these people. And these firms will have the same problem they have today: 90% of their revenue is generated by 10% of their accounts - because all the other account holders are too busy to log into their account every day/week.

If we had a company with a high burn rate, I would be concerned. But given our size and stage the timing is all right (okay, I could do with a little bit less negativity around me). We will need 24 months to launch and establish our service. By then people will realize that the stock market is still open and alive.

This year went by fast. It feels like we just started, squatting in a friends office in Midtown beginning of January.

In February we attended Money:Tech ‘08, anxious to discover potential competition. Having received good feedback and encouragement we continued and built our first prototype of Strateer. This prototype allows to visually build and backtest trading strategies in a matter of seconds. And more important it got us really excited about the prospect of having such a tool to better invest in the stock markets.

The prototype allowed us to raise our Angel round that finally closed in June. We started building a world class development team which ended up being distributed between China, Pakistan, Belarus, Germany, France and the US. With this team at our hands we built our first public product that launched in November: Alerts4all.com.

Alerts4all is the first easy-to-use real-time stock market alert tool for the individual investor. Wall Street tools for Main Street - Chapter 1. Blog reviews were positive and we landed articles in Barron’s and Marketwatch.

The meltdown of credit markets, stock markets and the overall economy was unsurprisingly the most affecting development for us. It affected our funding environment (-), the access to talent (+) and most important our customer (?).

In 2008 we saw a proliferation of financial blogging and the use of Twitter. Stocktwits is probably the most exciting development. Community driven investment discussions and decisions will be key for what we are up  next year with Strateer.com

We would like to thank all those people that supported us with their ideas, their feedback, their contributed time and of course their check book last year. Without you we would not have been able to get that far.

2009 will be a challenge. We believe that Strateer is a child of the changes we see on the capital markets. 2009 will be about non-nonsense and getting things done on a tight budget. But 2009 will yield as well opportunities for small, innovative, fast and hungry companies. We are looking forward to continue to build this company with the enthusiasm and support of all the people around us.