Tradestreaming is a community of investors learning directly from experts.

I’m Zack Miller, investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Tradestreaming.com and I literally wrote the book on how to invest in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

Tradestreaming is the resource I’ve created to help me become a better investor.  I believe it will help you as well.

 

The Elevator Pitch

My eldest son recently celebrated his birthday and received a Rubik’s Cube from one of his friends.  Instead of fiddling around trying to solve it, he headed straight to YouTube and began learning the solution algorithm. He knew there was value in learning from experts.

Why waste time?  Better to harness the expert’s knowledge to jump start the learning process.

Tradestreaming’s mission is to identify expert investing investors and to extract whatever expertise we can to better our own investing.

The Longer Story

Journalism-driven investing + access to free data

Historically, the previous decade represented the age of the periodical and its massive influence on investors.  The era of the Wall Street Journal could be defined by the journalist’s influence on the investment community.

The Internet era ushered in a quick democratization of financial information (led by Yahoo Finance).  E*Trade, Schwab, and Ameritrade’s cheap, online trading empowered investors with a new-found independence.

But with all this came a heightened sense of responsibility as investors became masters of their own destinies.

Just because we can call up financial information on thousands of companies at a click didn’t mean we are better prepared to make our own investing decisions.

What stocks or funds should we be looking at?  What about basic asset allocation decisions?  Should we be this active in the process?

Enter the World of Opinion

A small start-up began making noise few years back. Seeking Alpha began aggregating highly-opinionated financial blog content together to help investors with their decision making.

Today, Seeking Alpha stands as one of the largest (and fastest growing) destinations for investment information.  But there’s still a problem…

Expert Opinion leads to Expert-Driven Learning

Investors (at least many smart people I’ve met) still struggle with the basic framework of investing.

Just because we know what a price/earnings ratio is doesn’t mean we know how to use it to make better investment decisions.

Seeking Alpha provided much needed opinion but as other industries have shown, what’s really valuable — and this is so true for investing — is the educational process.  Just like my son reached to YouTube to help him solve a puzzle, investors require expert learning to aid them in their decision making.

Enter Tradestreaming

I created Tradestreaming as a place where investors can learn directly from experts in their fields.  If we’re all committed to bettering our investing process — to making better, more profitable decisions — then it would follow that we’re also committed to learning from true domain experts.

On Tradestreaming, you’ll encounter domain experts who will provide impactful, actionable learning to help you become a better investor.

Why me? — The Shameless Plug

Well, what I hadn’t said until now was that I’ve been intimately involved in helping investors become better at what they do.

When I was a hedge fund analyst about 10 years ago, I began researching and investing in cutting-edge Internet technologies.  It became very clear to me that the investing process could be entirely improved upon with some of the tools being developed.  So, I began learning all I could about the Internet, technology and their intersection with investing.

I left to join a young startup at the time, Seeking Alpha (now one of the largest and fastest growing online financial sites).  We were a small group with a vision to change the way investors do their thing.  I was responsible for helping land big league partnerships with Reuters, Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch and Barron’s, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, AOL Finance and Google Finance.

I’ve been involved in the massive changes affecting how global investors are researching stock markets. I’ve helped make this process more valuable for you.

I even wrote a book about this incredible shift. Published in the summer of 2010, Tradestream your Way to Profits: Building a Killer Portfolio in the Age of Social Media (Wiley) details these changes and provides investors with a framework of 8 different strategies (they’re numerous, really) you can easily use to harness the power of increased transparency and collaboration in the investing process.

I currently consult to a variety of startups in the industry (Covestor, for instance), act as an advisor on others, and continue to seek out expertise to tap into.

Interested in chatting how I can help you?  Get in touch.

What’s your input?

Part of learning to become a better investor in today’s age of social media is the collaborative learning process.  The more we share, the better and faster we improve.  I’m working hard to make Tradestreaming a valuable resource for you.  If you have any suggestions on how to make Tradestreaming better, let me know.