Hello Fellow ChartWatchers!
Happy 2015! All signs point to 2015 being a very interesting year for the stock market. The long-term rally that we've had since the lows of 2009 can't continue forever, can it? Regardless of your opinion on that question, remember that StockCharts.com gives you the perfect perch for monitoring the strength of the market as we head into this crucial 5th year of the rally. Your can use our long-term charts, our comparison graphs, our market commentators or, ideally, a combination of all of those things to stay on top of exactly what is going on with stocks.
Last time, I listed many of the improvements we made to StockCharts.com in 2014. Today I'm going to pull out my crystal ball and talk about improvements that we hope to make to the website in 2015. While I cannot state with 100% certainty that all of these things will come to pass, here's what the crystal ball is currently telling me we'll add:
- International Stock Data - first up is the London Stock Exchange. After than, the National Stock Exchange of India. And after that, we'll have to see. It depends on the feedback we get from users throughout the world.
- Webinars - Greg Schnell and Arthur Hill already have regularly scheduled webinars on Tuesday and Thursday. Watch for Erin Heim to begin her "DecisionPoint" webinar later this month. And I plan on starting up my own webinar series with interviews and "how-to" tips in January also.
- Improved Webinar Registration - The current webinar registration process is a kludge. We'll have a dedicated webinar area of our website available soon that will make it much easier to find and register for whichever webinars you are interested in.
- More Tom Bowley - Watch for Tom's new blog and webinar series to crank up in February. Tom's talks on Seasonality and repeating market effects was extremely popular at ChartCon and he'll be expanding on that work here soon.
- Wyckoff-oriented Blog - Another very popular talk at ChartCon was Bruce Fraser's talk on Wyckoff analysis. Bruce will be expanding on that talk via another new blog on our website starting later this year.
- More ChartPacks - Watch for Greg Schnell to release a ChartPack just as soon as I can pin him down and force him to do it. Greg - seriously? No ChartPack yet?
- Paper Trading Games - This one will be huge. (I've buried it here in the middle of my list because we still have a bunch of work to do and I don't want the casual readers to get all excited about it just yet.) Later this year we hope to allow people to practice trading from a virtual brokerage account using either live price data or pseudo-data from the past. In addition, we also will be allowing people to set up trading competitions between groups of friends. Stay tuned!
- New ChartNotes - We are in the middle of a complete re-write of our ChartNotes annotation tool. When complete, the new version won't require plug-ins (no more Flash or Java!), will run faster, will have an easier-to-use interface, and will allow you to create better looking annotations for your charts. That's win-win-win-win!
- New P&F Chart Workbench - The current P&F workbench is one of the oldest pages on our website. We'll be giving it some love later this quarter with a big update. There won't be many changes to the charts themselves, but the workbench controls will work much better.
- Index and Market Indicator Improvements - We will be greatly expanding the documentation for all of our indexes and market indicators (i.e., the symbols that start with "$" or "!"). We will also continue to improve the accuracy and historical data for those symbols as well.
- Online SCU Events - Watch for us to announce webinar versions of our popular SCU seminars later this year.
- Fundamental Data - Watch for us to add historical earnings information and other fundamental data to our charts "soon."
- An App - OK, this one is a stretch. I'm pretty positive all the things I've listed up to this point will happen. This one, not so much. But we will be seriously investigating the possibility of creating an App for your smartphone. At the very least, we will do a major revamp of our current mobile website: http://m.stockcharts.com
And, just like last year, all of these features will be added to the website without a price increase. Our strategy remains unchanged - we will continually increase the value of a StockCharts membership without increasing the price. The only time we've increased prices in the past was when the stock exchanges raised their per-user-per-month fees. Unless that happens again, we will not be raising prices this year either.
Quick Note for ChartCon enthusiasts: We probably will not hold a ChartCon in Seattle this year. Instead, we are angling towards holding one in 2016. That said, we are also looking into holding a one-day, webinar-based version of ChartCon online later this year but there are still several issues that need to be worked out. Stay tuned for more later.
So happy 2015 everyone! Now, where did I park my flying car...
- Chip
