tactical trader

Here’s some advice for you: be careful when talking about your investments, especially when they’re doing well.

And what has prompted me to give this advice? The coup in Thailand.

While we don’t have any direct exposure to the Thai markets, we do have a number of Asian holdings in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Yesterday morning we were discussing how, over the last few months, they’ve all been doing very nicely, how they’d recovered following the dip in May, and how we were happy to continue holding them in the portfolio.

Then the Thai military decides to stage a coup while their President is out of the country – great! We all know how the financial markets love a bit of shock news. Although I’m certain they didn’t do this just to spite us (I’d have to be really paranoid to think that), their timing was perfect

Fortunately our holdings haven’t been badly affected with Japan down 0.98%, Korea up 0.78% and Taiwan up 1.16% at the time of writing. I just hope that things don’t destabilise in the country, that some crazed military leader doesn’t install himself as a dictator and that the markets don’t get too spooked by any future developments.

As for us, I think we’ll just keep quiet about the things that are going well, just in case…

Fans of the Trader Locator will be pleased to know that, thanks to the efforts of the Google Maps developers, it now works well with Internet Explorer.

All of the location markers should now be loaded in around 20 seconds - a vast improvement on the several hours it used to take Firefox users will also see an improvement, while Opera remains as lightening fast as ever.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the reach of our membership has started to extend into the Middle East and South East Asia, and we've also seen more members registering from mainland Europe. As you'd expect, the UK and USA are still the most popular locations.

If you'd like to appear on the locator map don't forget to enter your address in your profile. If you're currently in hiding for some reason then you can also choose to opt out!

Well it came as no surprise to me that Tactical Trader failed to make it into Time Magazine’s 50 Coolest Websites list this year. In fact there were no financial sites in the list which must mean that finance just isn’t cool this year

What did surprise me is how well we scored in a recent independent survey of UK traders conducted by the organisers of one of the country’s biggest trading and investment shows. The survey asked “Which online sites do you use most often for investment news or research?” and the top five responses were:

1. ADVFN

2. Financial Times

3. Bloomberg

4. Yahoo! Finance

5. Interactive Investor

As you can see these are some large and well financed sites on the list.

But what about Tactical Trader?

We may not have managed to make the top five (or even the top ten!) but we did rank higher than MoneyAM, TheStreet and even Investors Chronicle - not bad for a site developed, financed and managed by just Steve and I.

The survey participants were primarily stock traders and 37% considered themselves experienced or very experienced with an average portfolio size of just under £0.5m.

As we approach our fourth anniversary (and get ready to celebrate one year since our relaunch) it is good to know that we’ve established ourself as a popular resource for traders and investors to learn more about the markets.

And anyway ‘coolness’ is such an inaccurate measure of success (rather like the number of posts to our forum)

Okay, so it’s not exactly about trading, but this ‘interface free’ touch driven screen demonstrated by Jeff Han at a TED Talk back in February is pretty darn impressive

A lot of people have compared this technology to that shown in the film Minority Report and while this isn’t strictly accurate (there are definitely no pre-cognitive capabilities!), it is a great example of how the technology shown in science fiction can eventually become a reality.

I particularly like the idea of computer systems no longer requiring the traditional keyboard and mouse arrangement for input and the more intuitive way in which applications can be used. I’m sure the extremely clunky and counter-intuitive trading and charting packages on the market today would be excellent candidates for this kind of technology.

My only concern: won’t the panel get full of greasy fingerprints?