Tim Knight, founder of SocialTrade.com, discusses his love of charts and how he feels his unique site can help a trader focus on just those markets they are following.
My guest today is Tim Knight. He has a new Web site called SocialTrade.com. We’re here to talk to him about that. So Tim, talk about SocialTrade.com. What is it?
Well, it’s essentially a site that allows people to share mostly charts, but really, anything they like in the world of trading. I got my inspiration from a couple of different places that you may be familiar with.
One is a site called Reddit.com. This is a site where people put up interesting articles and people up vote them and they all bubble to the top. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t check it out and I’ll always see something funny or informative. And there’s another site everybody’s heard about called Pinterest, which people put up usually things to do with crafts or decorating, and there’s this wall of things that are pinned, metaphorically, to this wall.
I thought to myself, I would like to have something like that in the world of trading, because in our comment stream—we have a very active comment stream on my blog, but it’s very ephemeral. I mean, unless you’re there all the time, you’re just going to miss it.
I wanted a permanent place where people could tack up interesting examples, knowledge, trading rules, what have you. That’s what SocialTrade is all about. Anyone can contribute and everyone can learn and share.
That’s an interesting idea, because there are a lot of traders out there who are looking for people to follow, but there’s so much noise, too many Twitter accounts out there, they don’t know who to follow. Will the site kind of help me see who’s right a lot and who is being followed by other people?
Yeah, it does. There’s that social aspect of it, as the name implies, because there are different ways to view it. One way is you can pick certain categories that you want to follow...like, I’m only interested in the forex market and gold.
Or you can say, well, I’m interested in these particular four people; I love the things they post. They have witty or knowledgeable or clever things to say. These four guys I’m going to follow, or I’ll follow a mix. So you can extract, surgically, the individuals or the categories that you want to follow on a daily basis, so that when you hit the site that’s the first thing that’s presented to you.
All right, it sounds like you’re an entrepreneur/trader; you’re also obviously a popular blogger. You have all of those things. Do you see your kind of business side as having multiple revenue streams? Is that how you look at it?
You know, I actually have made an ethic of mine to do only what I love, and that’s cost me a lot over the years, I’m sure. If I were the sort who just loved the office and loved meetings and all that, I’m sure I’d be a richer man today, but I love charts more, and so I build things around those charts.
One of it is the blog; I run a little hedge fund. I also have SocialTrade now, but my entire life orbits around these things that I have this unexplainable love for, and that’s why it exists.
When you are so popular with all of these things and the blog, how do you handle the e-mail volume and the phone calls and everything? What do you do to manage that?
It’s just part of a rhythm. I’m fortunate enough to be able to work from home, so my time is very efficient. I don’t have any boss to report to, any meetings to go to. I just sit there and the rhythm of the day is charting, trading, writing, and participating in these communities.
