Strateer Blog

It still surprises me. Most online broker accounts are inactive and nobody is doing anything about it. Even though most of these accounts have a balance and/or open positions. In fact online broker generate 90% of their transaction revenues with just 10% of their accounts.

It seems like the business model of online broker firms has been so far: drive an aggressive marketing campaign to bring in bodies and then hope that some of them are active investors. Those people that turn out to be active investors get a lot of additional services and tools (most of these too complicated for me) to make them stay as long as possible and to not make them move to the competition. So everybody is fighting for this 10% of active accounts. Nobody cares about the other 90%.

I am one of those 90%. I am too busy to follow my portfolio each day, but I know what I should do: limit my losses, manage my risk, lock in my profits, sell my loosing investments (my wrong ideas) and try develop as long as possible my winning investments (sometimes I am right). This has nothing to do with market timing. This is intelligent buy-and-hold.

It would be easy to get me to trade: My online broker firm should monitor my position for me. I do not want a tool that I have to use/understand. I want my broker to just monitor my positions for me. Automatically.

So when I lost a certain amount, I get an email giving me an update on my position, telling me what the situation of that stock is right now and providing me a link to trade. Or when I made a  nice profit that is at risk of being lost, I get an email telling me that now could be a good time to lock-in those profits - nobody went broke from doing that yet.

Turns out that online broker firms do not follow what their customers are doing. They do not upsell. They ignore the inactive accounts, even when it would be so easy to create a set of default alerts for each position one of their customers enters (hey, I can always opt-out of these alerts).

But I think this is changing. The margin/balance business of online broker firms is dead. Options volume (very profitable) is declining and everybody is bracing for a reduction in trade activity. Now it is the time to think about way to generate incremental revenue. I think we can help with Alerts4All.

NEW YORK, Feb 05, 2009 — Today Alerts4All, the easy-to-use real-time stock alerts tool, announced the launch of a new set of stock alerts to help individual investors in volatile stock markets. This makes Alerts4All the first service to launch real-time chart pattern alerts and improved stop-loss alerts.

Alerts4All now offers Chandelier Stop alerts that adapt to market volatility levels and help investors to protect their portfolios. Instead of using a fixed percentage to update a stop price from current high prices, as done by traditional Trailing-Stop-Loss alerts, Alerts4All’s new Chandelier Stop takes into account the trading range that the stock is traded in. This ensures that while the portfolio of the investor stays protected, the investor is not stopped out of a position as volatility increases.

 Alerts4All chart pattern alerts inform investors when important chart formations are being formed. Alerts4All is the first service that allows individual investors to use these powerful stock market alerts in real-time. Alerts4All offers bullish and bearish chart patterns like Double Top, Double Bottom and Flag Formation.

 ”Today, individual investors are disadvantaged compared to investment banks and hedge funds, who benefit from advanced algorithmic stock market technologies.” said Fabian Siegel, CEO of Strateer. “With Alerts4All.com we intend to change this. With our new set of stock alerts we provide individual investors with better tools for volatile markets. This is another step in our mission to bring Wall Street tools to Main Street.”

 Individual investors often miss the right time to buy or to sell because they are too busy to actively monitor the stock markets. This leads to frustration and bad stock performance. With stock alerts from Alerts4all, investors can now protect themselves against losses or lock in profits by receiving real-time stock alerts at the right time.

 ”Many individual investors use chart pattern analysis to find the right time to buy and sell stocks,” said Matthieu Labour, CTO of Strateer. “Instead of doing this manually, our pattern matching engine is analyzing stock prices and volume continuously and sends stock alerts in real-time once a chart pattern has been detected. Automating this time consuming task is a big help for many investors.”

About Alerts4All.com

Alerts4All is the easy-to-use stock alert tool from www.Alerts4all.com, a service provided by Strateer, Inc. Alerts4All monitors stock prices in real time so investors can determine opportunities to buy or sell, and maximize gains and limit losses. Stock alerts are delivered to users via email, RSS or to a cell phone. Alerts4All offers stock alerts including price and volume, as well as technical indicators, fundamental data, and user-friendly reporting charts. Alerts4All is a service provided for individual investors and is available as well as white label solution for online brokerage firms.