The close of the year is as good as any for some introspection and review – whether it’s a trader’s business plan, P & L for the year, or a company’s dashboard of metrics and goals.

On a trip to New York earlier this month, we had amazing conversations with current and potential customers representing the biggest of the insitutions and the modest of active traders.
Feedback like this is crucial to learning where customers want us to go and whether what we currently do delights them. Can a trader take a similar approach? Who are a trader’s customers? (e.g., spouse, family, mentor, other traders)? Can any of these individuals provide valuable feedback? I think so. If you’re not getting access to this kind of information unsollicited (and constructively), go out and ask for it.

Many of these comments will get heard again and internalized at our upcoming Trade-Ideas Annual Planning Meeting (details and an invitation to interested readers TBD), but I thought I’d share with you a list I call,

Things I Learned from our Recent NY Dog and Pony Show and Why That’s Important to our Customers

1. Trade-Ideas and its product suite, which includes The OddsMaker and Automated Trading Bot, are equally valuable among institutional traders as they are to the individual trader.
2. The ability to back-test your strategies and automate those results is invaluable in maintaining a competitive edge in today’s market environment.
3. Our technology continues to be validated by the top prime brokers and technology providers. Back-testing, for example, is becoming an increasingly more important part of the value of our product when looking for new business.
4. Trade-Ideas is bringing the ‘sexy-back’ to equities. Call it the Justin Timberlake-ification of stock trading. This makes sense. The same asset class can be entirely reinvented with better technology – better tools – that enable a trader to see opportunities more clearly and in more places of volume and volatility than before as well as assess the risk of such strategies with more accuracy.
5. Now that real traders are test-driving our automated capabilities, important feedback and better questions to solve are improving the way we think about automation. For instance the new limit price order intelligence allows our traders to let the momentum of the extended trades to come to them and have then not be worried on losing a lot of money on wide spread stocks. What was once a danger is now an opportunity.
6. Continue to clarify the value proposition to different customers. It is easy to get confused by industry jargon like “conditional orders” versus “idea generation automation”. Understand that they can be the same thing.
7. Futures and Options are in demand and coming!