Slope’s greatest success is the community we have built, and I am constantly trying to think of ways to help bring the community together.
In this spirit, there are a couple of new features we’ve added I wanted to bring to your attention. Most of you are already aware that, when entering a comment, there are actually five choices of what style of “comment” you can enter:
- Comment – a text remark, either stating something or responding to someone else;
- Trade – a trade idea, either long or short, for a given symbol. You don’t enter any quantity, but over the course of time, your wins and losses are tracked for others to see;
- Link – provides a way to share an interesting web site or other item from the Internet with an optional comment. This is quicker and easier than embedding a URL into a regular comment, and the most popular links posted by users are constantly tracked;
- Chart – lets you post a simple chart for a given symbol;
- Question – try as I might, I can’t get people to use this quite right, but the idea here is for people to pose questions that are not time-sensitive so that, when answered, they can be added to our Q&A database (the “misuse” is that folks might ask something like “Why is the Dow up 30 points right now?” or “What time is Apple’s earnings report coming out this afternoon?” or something similar that will have no value in the future).
Here, for example, is a hypothetical trade I might enter, with a very pithy comment:
The “trades” are not real trades, of course, but this feature provides a nice way to share ideas and show off your trading prowess to other Slopers. Clicking on a profile for a user reveals, among other things, their overall performance and the individual trades which constitute it.
None of the above is new, but what is new is that, on the right column of the site, there is a leaderboard showing who has the best ratio of wins to total trade ideas. Clicking on any of the profiles provides a shortcut to the performance details shown above.
More broadly, there’s also a new menu called called the Hall of Fame, located in the Community menu. This shows a quartet of “top ten” Slopers under various categories. So this is another way to hone in one your fellow Slope of Hope readers that are the most interesting or active.
I am wrapping up my three-day sojourn in Southern California today, and I’ll be driving my golf cart on the long trip home for a good chunk of the day. Thanks for stopping by!
