Last week’s Traders Expo in Las Vegas left us physically spent with no time to regroup before following up on opportunities and celebrating Thanksgiving. The Expo revealed surprising and encouraging trends that we are now tuned into and will watch to see develop. Let’s hear from you whether you agree or not:

• Existing tools among vendors get better at what they already do. Charts contain more functionality, order execution comes with more options, background ‘plumbing’ gets faster, etc.
• Examples include Fidelity’s improvements to Wealth Lab Pro, E*Trade’s expanded free research and better conditional orders, Carlin Financial Group’s improved spread trading technology, and OptionsXpress’ penny pricing for options spreads.

• Companies continue to weed out tedious, manual steps from the trade process in new creative ways. This includes not just the extreme of automated trading, but a lot of other partially automated options where the trader can simply move from trade idea to execution more quickly. (Ed.: read the comments for a clarification on this point)
• Examples include the importation and creation of symbol lists in a platform on the fly (See Stocktickr), linking among tools within and outside of the trade platforms, and (our sweet spot) trade idea generation and pattern recognition.

• Educators, coaches, mentors, and trainers are catching up to their advanced students’ knowledge of trading technology and are using such tools to improve their market analysis and performance. Those married to or associated with a particular platform now identify what gaps exist and increasingly look to fill them with third party tools like Trade-Ideas and others. Education and mentoring must be a continuing part of a trading plan. I’m more convinced of this as I read more of Dr. Brett Steenbarger’s latest book, Enhancing Trader Performance.
• Perhaps I’ll do a more detailed review of who I see as adding value. We will initially include in our reviews the following: Linda Raschke, Toni Hansen from Trading from Main Street, Rick Swope from The Market Guys, Adrian Manz, and a few others

In fact let’s build the interview questionnaire together. I can think of a few to start off:

1. Who are the giants whose shoulders you stand on? Who most influenced your teaching philosophy? Your trading philosophy?
2. Who is your ideal type of student? teaching environment?
3. How has your lesson plan or trading principles changed from your first student?
4. What tools do you use in your trading and that assist you in the execution of your trade plan?
5. How do you keep abreast of new tools, technology, etc.?