The Chatroom is where we collaborate, exchange information, and share lessons learned on real-time trading.
Features of our online community include:
- Chat-room for daily trading, hosted on Campfire.com
- Forum for after action review of closed trades and lessons learned
- Charts of interest on data, setup, exits, indicators, and historical trend
- Part of Tortoise Silver & Gold subscription service
- Workshop attendees get use of the chatroom for a year
- Members can invite a guest
Purpose of the chatroom
- To provide real-time discussions and information exchange among traders focusing on intraday and swing trade systems through a Tortoise-style lens
- To engage in professionally developing discussions, exploring ideas through dialogue
- To maintain an online trading journal for case studies of typical trades in practice
We want the community to be:
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- Voluntary: people that we know are interested in our kinds of trading would be invited and offered a free unlimited trial, and would self -select as subscribers if they decided the group added value. The unlimited free trial is a compelling force for good and relieves me of the need to be a marketer. Value will be discovered by participants and no selling is involved.
- Participatory: each member is invited to participate as they feel moved to do so. There will be no pressure to talk, contribute or attend. Transcripts must be available so that people from different time zones can participate in a conversation distributed through time and location and topic.
- Friendly: A moderator (Ken) will be able to enforce standards of acceptable public behavior. The intent is to let the community find its own level of acceptable discourse, but in general it must pass muster with my mom. We will not say or do anything our moms wouldn’t approve of.
- Humble: we will try to maintain a spirit of humble cooperation, acknowledging the market is not only unknown, it may very well be unknowable. We will approach it and in our discussions acknowledge that trading is like sneaking up on a semi-sleeping grizzly.
- Energetic: the environment must offer enough reliable, frequent value to be a place where people are eager to participate on an intraday basis through weekly basis or it will die of its own weight and irrelevance.
- A place for reflection: we must have ways not only to trade intraday in fast moving markets but have the ability to conduct and review thoughtful reflection
- A gathering place for community ideas: we want to be a place that people naturally think of to share their new ideas, lessons learned and insights
- Efficient: the community site must be simple and intuitive to operate and maintain, and allow for multiple modes of communication so that it is a one stop shop for community information sharing needs.
- Effective: Value must be added through the process of sharing, reflection, discussion and information storage. People will be encouraged, furthermore on how they derive value, so that others will be encouraged to try it.
- Self-funding: If the community is a true value add, then participants will be willing to pay a fair price for the value they receive.
- Flexible: the community solution must support multiple modes of discourse, allow for storage, have the possibility of multiple sub-groups and self-directed work group areas. It must have security, privacy, storage, transcripts, images, text and multiple modes of formatting. It must also be scalable as the community grows.
- Web-enabled: It absolutely must be accessible through the web, through multiple end user devices in order to be useful to travelers
- Low maintenance: it must have a simple robust architecture and simple tools for routine administration. Individual members must be able to configure the environment to their preferred work mode.
- Support world wide access and time zones: there must be no limitations for members access based on geography or time of day (This quickly became synonymous with the Web-based criteria).
- User-driven: the community of practice must be able to drive the direction, mode and content of discourse. It will not be imposed from above.
- My role will be as a content provider, administrator, marketer, editor, coach, trader and as a community guide/architect. I want to exercise minimum control for maximum positive effect and provide a rich development environment for truly gifted and creative traders.