Trader’s Narrative

box.net is a neat Web 2.0 company that gives you a free mini hard drive that you can access from any internet connection. You can have it be private, invitation only or totally public. This by itself isn’t that nifty when you consider that you can turn an ordinary, run of the mill gmail account into a virtual hard drive.

What makes box.net’s offering stupendiferous is the widgitization of the hard drive. As you can see below, my public files are there in this cute little widget. You and anyone else can access them, view them, download them, and even save them. What’s more, image files, sound files and movies play inside this little widget. I don’t have any in my widget yet but trust me, it’s very cool.

You can manipulate the widget by going to the top right corner and clicking on the drop down menu. I suggest you view them as ‘List View’ not ‘Icon View’ since it gives you more information and takes less space.

I’ve got 10 GB of storage capacity so I’ll be able to squirrel away quite a few books, files and other trading related resources. Maybe even a few books that are, how shall I say this… hard to get? or maybe very expensive? In digital form they suddenly become quite affordable

Right now there are just 15 17 files but I will keep adding from my collection. I’ll also be uploading other types of interesting files. For example, my historical sentiment data. To get these goodies, bookmark and revisit the ‘Best Of Trader’s Narrative‘ section since that’s where the widget will find permanent residence. Or grab my box.net RSS feed to get notified when new files are added.

Explore the existing files and if you have any special requests, let me know. I might just have it somewhere

Just a few more days left in the first Trader’s Narrative Trading Blog Contest.
Hurry !

If you’ve been sharp you have already noticed that MarketWatch has a few new features out. For example, when you’re searching for information on their site they now have an Ajax enabled search which will give you suggestions on the fly. Exactly like my blog search function (top right). Go ahead, give it a try, type something and wait for a second, then scroll down the choices and click.

But that’s just eye-candy. The new feature that I’m really interested in is called MarketPerception. Its a little widget that comes up whenever you’re looking at information for any security on MarketWatch. Here is the widget for Apple:

After you vote, it presents you with the results and a few other pieces of information:

Clicking on more results will take you to a page where you can see what securities are being voted on the most and which have gotten the most extreme sentiment votes, either bullish or bearish. This is probably the most valuable way of looking at this new information.

Not only can you see which security is getting the most vociferous support but you can also see which is attracting the most attention from the lemmings out there. Right now there are very few votes, but this is still a very new feature. I’m also glad to notice that they only allow you vote once. This isn’t a totally scientific poll but every bit of attention to detail helps.

As you know, I really like finding little known ways of measuring sentiment. Here’s hoping this feature will grow up to become a nice contrary indicator.

If I were the owner of any social stock picking site I’d be a tad nervous. It seems that the management at MarketWatch ‘Get it’ and are slowly moving their considerable user base towards a social, interaction based model.