Here are a few random ideas that you might like to consider. These aren't requests as such and they probably won't make you any money and may involve a bit of work. However, they may give ET some USPs over other forums competing in the same space and could also provide some interesting metrics: 1) ET market barometer. When people log in, they can be presented with a quick poll: Do you think the markets are going up/down/don't know today? They answer the question and proceed on to the forums as usual. People are only asked the question once per day with an easy option to not to vote at all each time. This data can be collected to provide an ET sentiment indicator which can be plotted on the home page in graphical format along with historical performance etc. It would be interesting to see if it turns out to be a contrarian indicator or not. 2) Re-vamped ET Chat. I would hazard a guess that a significant number of people are not aware of ET chat or find it a little too cumbersome. A lot of the threads in the Trading forum would actually be better suited to a real-time chat environment whereby people just want to do a brain dump every 10 seconds. So, the idea is to have a newer and improved chat room which would allow you to dump the last ten or so most recent lines of chat directly on the home page with a quick link for people to join in. Kind of like teaser text. Not sure if my description makes sense. 3) Portal style interface for the home page. Perhaps three column layout for the forum summaries rather than one long list. I believe you were already considering an idea like this some time ago. Although, not forums, sites like www.theregister.co.uk manage to fit in 3 columns plus ads and other links without sacrificing font-size and readability. I realize some thread titles are quite long though. 4) A complete look and feel revamp. Even if it's web2.0. You know you want to!
"Do you think the markets are going up/down/don't know today?" Personally, if I was a boss, I would not want a room full of "I don't know's". How about a poll without the "I don't know" Raise the expectations, think man, I don't care if your wrong but make a decision. Secondly, I would prefer a poll at 4pm asking "are the markets going up or down tomorrow." That's just me though and my .02.
Sure, but a large number of people visiting ET don't neccessarily need or have an opinion on daily broad index market direction - it's not pertinent to their type or style of trading. So if they were forced to pick one they might just pick the first option every time which could skew the data. Your point is taken though. The main thrust of my suggestion is that since there seems to be no end of opinions on market direction from a bunch of ET members on a daily basis - might as well try and harness that noise and turn it into data. I give it about 2% chance of implementation but it would be neat to have a mini-chart on the ET home page with a plot of the ET sentiment indicator alongside the indexes.
Have you ever visited a website that upon going to the site you see one of those multimedia flash presentation advertisements... As it starts to play you also see a link that saids either "Skip Intro" or "Go Direct to Website"... Take a look at MarketWatch.com http://www.marketwatch.com/avatar.asp?dist= Do you sit there and watch the presentation or do you go directly to the website??? What if you saw that every trading day at that particular site. Do you think you'll soon grow tired of seeing it to eventually ignore it every time you see it??? I'm just curious. Mark
Indeed, I hate interstitial advertisements and I always "skip" them just as I would always "skip" this poll myself. However, there does appear to be a number of ET members who don't seem to ever tire of making these predictions and it is these members who the poll would collect data from. Could a poll such as this provide a much needed outlet for them and thus mitigate the number of threads started for that purpose? I suppose I'm just lazy. I've been meaning to attempt a data mining project whereby a bot page-scrapes ET threads on a regular basis and performs some kind of semantic text analysis to come up with this barometer. On the other hand, an ET sentiment indicator or ET index could be quite good for branding purposes.
"Indeed, I hate interstitial advertisements and I always "skip" them just as I would always "skip" this poll myself." Ditto. Although my first post was more of a direct reply to your suggestion and not necessarily mean I would vote. Your semantic bot scrape idea might have more merit. Personally, I don't care for polls because I place more emphasis on the posters credibility or comments that led them to their conclusion. In Feb when the market dropped, a poll would have offered not much in the future market direction as opposed to individual comments as to why. We can read those comments and draw our own conclusion, which in my case after reading what I thought were some excellent posts, I did not know which way the market would go but the panic subsided.
That is true, but it would be interesting to see what the ET-index would show every day and compare that to actual price-track ; in the long run it might gain some credibility, if only as a contrarian . If it were presented in a business like fashion and put the actual index prominently in view, only after[/i] the vote, I think this could be a huge succes, both for the traders and for Barron as a marketing instrument. Good plan, Ursa.. PS. I'm against revamp btw. Most all revamps I see are bad.
Just yakking, suppose you posted a basic 5 day chart (or whatever you choose 10 day m/a,etc) and then post the et poll on the same chart as the voters vote. We would then have a side by side comparison. So at the begining of the day we would have a target, then we'll see if the Dow hits the poll results. Maybe, choices could be, in addition or rather to market up or down, but market up 10 - 25 pts 25 - 50 pts. "Don't know" = flat 0 - 10.
One more thought. If you "handicapped" the voters. Rank the voters on correct "yes, no" votes, with progressive star ratings (maybe up to 5) then use a weighted average market up or down sentiment indicator.