TradeOffNews Blog

Recently we have come see high levels of user on our servers that do not line up with official purchases from the Apple Store. This could cut directly into our ability to host and serve real customers. This server operation requires cash every day.

For those who did purchase the application legitimately, Thank you. For those that did not please consider purchasing a legitimate copy. Software piracy can’t be justified no matter how hard you try.

You don’t have to be an expert to see that markets are pretty unpredictable these days. We think this reflects a more general trend where markets, and as a result individual companies, are affected not only by economy fundamentals but also investor psychology and/or sentiment. These factors are difficult to quantify and as such difficult to predict their impact on markets.  But what is clear is that news is influencing investors and indirectly the markets. For example, the headline today is “White House Rejects GM, Chrysler Plans; Moves to Reshape Auto Industry”. Markets going down hard. We see the same pattern over and over again. Obviously this is an opportunity for savvy investors and traders to make some money and we are working hard to give you best possible tools so you can identify these potential opportunities and profit from them.

Our two first reviews are in. Check them out in our new Press section. We are excited that there is such postive feedback for version 1.0 of StockAdvisor. Wait until they see what we have upcoming in future quarters! More reviews are in the oven as we speak.

Just an update. We submitted 1.0.1 to Apple Friday afternoon. Expect it sometime next week. This is a minor patch release that prepares the client for the larger 1.1 upcoming mid April. Most notable for this patch is a revised Add company UI + some minor bugs.

JM

So far the notification service being offered for SDK 3.0 Beta is great. We are on our way to creating demos of StockAdvisor using push notifications internally. This will greatly enhance the usability of the application by allowing you to get “blips” when opportunities occur - allowing you to drill deeper to find out the details. Overall the architecture is much cleaner and more intuitive than RIM’s. Bravo Apple. We will keep you posted.

We would like to hear what you think about having advanced versions of data from information sources such as Factivia, OneSource, Thomas Reuters and LexisNexus integrated with our back-end systems. Due to the costs involved, a more advanced application such as StockAdvisor Professional could be the good candidate for this type of information.

What does everyone think?, what type of model would be best? We generally assume an upfront capitol cost that is not too expensive is easiest, especially for a platform such as the iPhone. There is also possibility of having the current StockAdvisor have the aforementioned data included as part opportunities transparently for the customers that chose to upgrade their “data feed” - this being more a subscription model after the fact of purchasing the StockAdvisor.

The costs could be distributed well as a large user-base allows us to effectively scale the expensive data feeds appropriately.

It would be interesting to have some comments around these points. It could direct us better in evolving the platform and applications. Our goal is to get value in your hands, not just push out useless apps with features no one wants.

Best Regards

JM

CTO

As some of you have heard, Apple is showing us a sneak peak of its new OS march 17th in preparation for the competitive battle this summer between RIM, Google, Palm and Nokia. We will be watching this in detail in hope of new OS features that allow us to deliver more sophisticated application features for you. Namely, we are looking for Push notification to allow for StockAdvsior to run in the background and receive opportunities without having to run the application explicitly. Stay tuned.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our hosting provider had to do an emergency reboot on a cluster as of such connections to TradeOffNews servers were down until 9:16 EST March 13, 2009. We are dealing with them and are trying to understand more details what happened. Everything is back online now.

What I thought would be weeks ending up being days. Apple approved our app in less than 5 business days. It is now generally available and we are hard at work cranking out the next version with bug fixes, enhancements, etc.

I am connected to our servers and monitoring all activity related to the databases, performance and intelligence systems so in case anything happens we’re ready to deal with it.

I hope to splash some of my thoughts here around the current state of the market. Things are a bit hectic at the moment, I hope to get some more free time in the coming weeks as March loosens up some of my schedules.

Enjoy the market and leaves voice your opinion.

Trading and investing in the equity markets becomes more and more difficult. It seems that the markets are no longer driven by fundamentals and long term outlook. Psychology and mass media are playing increasingly important role in the market changes. Then you have the globalization of the financial markets where events in distant places impact our local markets in a significant way. But personally I see strong interplay between news information created by mass media of all kinds and our psychology being conditioned to respond to it in an emotional way rather than analytical. The fact is we don’t have time to assimilate and process all that information so we react to “the feel” of the news rather than it content. It is well known fact that negative news “sells” much better than positive but also the negative news has more impact on our decisions than positive ones.

We think that the link between the markets and the news is becoming stronger and stronger every year. Some may not like it but in the reality markets are reacting to mass media and their products – mostly news. What we trying to do here at TradeOffNews is to bring to you information extracted from thousands of pieces of news and translated in to actionable events. By using this information you could make better trading decisions and obviously make more money. We are not claiming that our products are 100% accurate or they make you a millionaire this year. But we think they bring a real value to your decision making process giving you access to new source of market and companies information.

We strongly encourage you to provide your comments and feedback to us. We are customer driven organization so any input from you is of highest value to us.

- TradeOffNews Team