Hello everyone. I was hoping some of you might be able to share their opinions of which chat service is the best. I personally enjoy using PalTalk but have heard a lot of good things about Hotcomm. Thanks in advance! qtip
Many IRC trading chatrooms are there. Hotcomm is more kind of tools used for conferancing, and not aimed solely for chating purpose, that's why you have to pay money for hotcomm rooms, while IRC, ICQ, Paltalk all can be used for free, and more widely used. I have used all four of them
I find that my inner dialogue is much more interesting than all the intelligent trading advice that gets spewed out day in and day out at these educational chat rooms.
Qtip, It's not so much what is the best software... It's more about what you plan on using it for. I've visited most of the public and private chat rooms...IRC, Hotcomm, Paltalk, ICQ et cetera. Paltalk hogs up computer resources and has voice along with ads. Lets put it this way, when your trading...its best to have Paltalk on a seperate computer than your broker execution platform. Hotcomm is more of a conferencing tool...inexpensive and used by some trader chat rooms. However, if you want to do true conferencing...like instant messaging, presentations, video conferencing, real phone conferencing, chart sharing and live-recordings while your not there...there are probably a dozen other software programs out there that does the job 10x better than Hotcomm. Such programs are used by some traders in private conference and cost a pretty penny for use. Just use Google and type in key words like Internet Conferencing or Web Conferencing et cetera. Lots of great stuff out there for you and a few traders to use privately. If that's the route your going...you and your pals should get something that has web conferencing, phone conferencing and video conferencing... Along with the ability to post charts and transfer files. I know 5 traders of the DAX (each trader lives in a different part of the world) that uses something called Convog and are very happy with it... Most of that stuff has free trials so you can try a lot of them before deciding upon with one your going to dish out some money for. IRC software is free...like mIRC or Trillian. Tons of traders communicate via such in public and private rooms...this is mainly used for simple realtime messaging. IRC programs usually don't hog up any computer resources. I personally use IRC on one computer. Just don't be doing any DCC file exchanges because this is a common hacker method. Try the below links that list a lot of stuff out there on the market. http://www.thinkofit.com/webconf/realtime.htm What ever you use...I would keep your trading group small and run it on a second computer. More important, if your not good at multi-tasking while trading... Stay away from any of those trader chat rooms because it will be a big distractions. However, if your good at trading and collaborating at the same time and need advance meeting tools far beyond instant messaging... Trading no longer needs to be a lonely job at home and can help with your bottom line if you among a group of successful traders. As for ICQ...is ok for normal chatting but not suitable for serious trader collaboration and it can be buggy along with suspected spyware. Last of all, if your question was really about what is the best chat rooms... Lets put it this way...the best rooms are private (free) and invitational only. Most of the public rooms are either useless (info that can not be converted into profits) or used by those just lurking and trying to pass some time until their next trade. Good luck. NihabaAshi