Looking to get into the trading game ”” or for a better way of playing the stock market? A new Danbury company believes it has the solution.
Ticker Tocker, a new integrated trading productivity platform to support both institutional and novice traders hoping to quickly find, test, learn, share, and/or execute trades, wrapped its first beta testing last week, to be followed by another beta test on Aug. 1 leading to a Sept. 1 live launch.
“Being on the right side of the market is what Ticker Tocker is all about,” said chief market strategist and co-founder Stephen Kalayjian at his 108 Mill Plain Road office in Danbury. “There are so many inefficiencies in the overall scope of the business. What we”™re doing is taking all those inefficiencies and addressing them in one universal platform.”
That platform, built with a patented technology, allows users access to both educational content ”” including videos, live rooms and chat rooms ”” and the ability to follow Ticker Tocker “leaders,” professional traders whose strategies, portfolios and real-time trades are designed to further help members formulate their own patterns.
“We help identify trends and reversals in the market by following patterns that repeat themselves on a daily basis,” Kalayjian said. “Everything and everyone has set patterns. It”™s like ”˜Groundhog Day”™ in a way ”” generally speaking, it can be the same thing over and over again.”
He apparently knows whereof he speaks: Kalayjian has more than 30 years of experience in the industry trading stocks, futures and currencies, having begun his career at the American Stock Exchange followed by positions at the New York Stock Exchange, the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board of Trade. From 1992 until 2004, he traded his own capital as well as that of various family offices and became a successful day trader, trading nearly two billion shares of U.S. stocks.
In 2005, Kalayjian founded his own firm, Real-Time Trading Technology, to research and develop software to help identify trends, reversals, patterns and divergences in the market place for all asset classes and time frames ”” experience that ultimately led to Ticker Tocker.
The monetary maven”™s experience actually dates back to when he was the ripe old age of 16. “My father was a member of the American Stock Exchange and asked me to come to work with him one day,” he recalled. “As soon as I heard the roar on the floor ”” traders screaming and trading ”” I knew it was something I wanted to do with my life.”
Not that everyone was so encouraging. Kalayjian reported that he left community college after a year when he received a “D” in economics. “I said to my dad, ”˜This woman”™s killing me!”™” he recalled. “The problem was that I was not a good test-taker. He said, ”˜That”™s it ”” I”™m getting you a job on Wall Street.”™ And I ended up getting hired within a day, proving that it really can be a matter of who you know.”
Along the way he said he met another mentor who taught him a valuable lesson: Set limits on yourself and stick to them. “When I was starting out, if I”™d set a hundred-dollar limit and I”™d made that by 11 a.m., I stopped and just watched what else was going on,” he said. “Then I”™d increase my limit each week.”
Such lessons ”” and many more complex ones ”” are what Kalayjian and Ticker Tocker”™s other leaders hope to impart on the site. “I love the educational aspect of it,” he said. “Helping novices grasp something that I feel could be beneficial to them is a key part of what we”™re doing, as well as maybe exposing veteran traders to other ideas and strategies.”
Access will of course come at a cost. Upon the official launch, subscribers to the platform will be offered a free trial and then monthly subscription fees of $400 for those of leader status ”” an established, verified professional who has a transparent, visible track record of success ”” and $160 for general investors.
Kalayjian declined to specify what the price tag for building and launching Ticker Tocker has been. “It”™s cost a lot,” he allowed.
