Well, it’s been a while in the making, but today I’m very excited to announce the launch of Tradervue, a web application for active traders!

When I left my full-time position at NewsGator about a year and a half ago, I started actively trading equities intraday. Yep, one of those day traders. I was thinking “I’m an engineer, how hard can this be?” Ha! Turns out it was harder than I thought.

I spent some time searching for a trading methodology that worked for me, and one that specifically worked for my personality. I like instant gratification – I often use overnight shipping when I order things, I hate that my TV takes 10 seconds or so to warm up, and I like trading during the day where I’m not subject to the whims of the market overnight when I can’t do much about it.

I eventually settled into a rhythm, with the help of many smart traders I met online, where I was trading actively moving stocks that had some catalyst for moving that day (earnings announcement, fresh news, etc.), and I would watch the order flow and do my thing. I worked pretty hard at it – I was at the screens an hour before the market opened, would trade most of the day, and then a few hours of prep work at night for the next day.

I also kept a trading journal in Pages (a word processor), where I would write down why I was making certain trades, how I was feeling about it at the time (confident, anxious, etc.), and I’d paste in order execution data and charts from my trading platform at the end of the day. I’d review this journal at the end of the week, and try to learn from my successful and not-so-successful trades. All in all, this was one of the best tools I had for understanding my trading.

But I hated keeping it.

I didn’t mind writing in it – why I was taking a trade, what was making me nervous about it, etc. That part was easy, and pseudo-creative work. What I hated was having to paste in my execution data, and pasting charts into it from my trading platform. It ended up being about an hour of busy-work at the end of every trading day. Once I even caught myself not taking a quick trade because I didn’t want to add even more work to my after-close routine. Obviously not good; my very best tool for improving my trading was becoming so onerous it was discouraging me from trading.

On the advice of many experienced traders, I also made a list of trading goals for the year. For 2011, two of my non-P&L-related trading goals were a) continue keeping my trading journal, because I was learning a lot from doing it, and b) come up with a way to objectively analyze my data to understand strengths and weaknesses that might not be obvious. For the second item, my hope was to find a product that would just work for me; I looked around for a while, but never found anything that “clicked.”

So with these two things in the back of my mind, I set to work to build something, just for myself, to address them. Find a way to write in my journal, but have the busy work be automated. Find a way to load all of my trading data, and show me views of it I haven’t seen before. Show me what’s working. And show me what’s not.

As I was building this, somehow I got distracted and decided to refocus a bit, and build a web application that could do this for everyone. And so was born Tradervue.

As Tradervue was taking shape, in the back of my mind I was thinking about the trading community I had learned a lot from, and the traders that actively share their ideas online on Twitter, StockTwits, and their blogs. What I have rarely seen is traders sharing actual trades. I don’t mean the sensitive data like how many shares were traded, or how much money was made – that’s not important. Rather, things like where did you enter this trade? How did you get in when it popped through the price level you were watching, but then dropped 0.50 before moving higher? When did you start to sell? Questions like that. Execution is everything – and so perhaps show people how you executed.

As I thought more about this, I noted that Tradervue had all of the data necessary to share trades. The challenge was more a matter of figuring out specifically what information should be excluded and kept private, and then make it easy to share the more educational parts. Shouldn’t it just be a click or two to share a trade with the community, complete with charts and commentary? I thought so.

So I built the sharing into Tradervue. And combined with the trading journal capabilities (with generated charts) and the analysis it can do, allowing you to drill down as far as you want, I think it’s a pretty cool product.

There were beta users whose average session length was measured in hours, with no more than a few minutes idle during that period. It was quite amazing, and exciting; I’m even more excited to see where it goes from here.

So, happy birthday to Tradervue – today is its day!