I am exceptionally pleased to announce the first step of what promises to be a very long journey for the Slope of Hope, which is the integration of our products with major brokerages. This is unprecedented in our nearly fifteen year history, and I want to be emphatic that this is an alpha version of just one baby step.
When you go to SlopeCharts, you will notice an icon in the lower left which resembles a U.S. dollar sign. This is how you can get to the Brokerage Control Center.
After you click it, a dialog box will appear showing the various brokerages you can use (which, at present, is just Ameritrade). The default “Current Data Feed” is Slope, but you can change this to the brokerage that you use. Once you have made this selection, click the Log In button.
You will be presented with a Secure Log-In dialog box. Please take note that this dialog box has nothing to do with Slope. We don’t access the data; we don’t see the data; we don’t store the data. Your login credentials are strictly between you and your brokerage. We are simply a third party being permitted access to very specific information at an “arm’s length” distance. Your brokerage, whoever it may be, takes your account privacy and control very seriously for obvious reasons.
A notice will appear so that you can permit Slope the authority to see certain data and allow you to submit certain commands.
Now the dialog box has changed so that you can see you are Logged In to the account.
Although there will be many other tabs in the future, at the moment there is just one additional tab called Brokerage Account which lets you see a variety of information about the balances and buying power in your account.
More importantly, once you are logged in, certain pages on the Slope of Hope system will use your brokerage as the data source as opposed to Slope’s own data, which is sometimes delayed or even end-of-day only (that is, from the prior day). By marrying Slope to your brokerage account, you enjoy access to the same data privileges you have there (which is typically real time information).
Thus, if you use the OptionsDots feature and click on an individual dot, not only will the data will real time, but there is also a lot more information than is normally available when you have to rely on Slope’s own data source.
Likewise, if you go the Option Chain page, the data will be drawn from your brokerage, thus it is likely to be real time information.
There is so, so, so much more we intend to do with this integration. For now, I encourage all Ameritrade users to try it out, email me (or use the @ feature in comments) with problems or ideas and dream big. This is an exciting new frontier for all Slopers as we build this out into other brokerages and a much richer feature set.
