thinkorswim Introduces Social Networking Site mytrade.com on Its Trading Platform; Achieves a Record Number of Subscribers in Its First Week

CHICAGO, July 16 /PRNewswire/ — thinkorswim, Inc., a financial technology pioneer and the industry-leading online brokerage division of thinkorswim Group Inc. (Nasdaq: SWIM - News), today announced the full integration of mytrade.com into its award-winning trading platform. mytrade.com is thinkorswim’s online social-networking content platform for investors of all experience levels.

Retail traders now have real-time access to a number of trading industry veterans’ notes, blogs, blog feeds, videos, twitter feeds and much more customizable content as they trade. With over 13,000 registered users, including the addition of over 7,000 since July 9th, mytrade.com has quickly become the fastest growing community site focused on active traders that includes futures, forex, stocks and options.

“We recognize the potency of our growing distribution network and our latest mytrade.com offering provides thinkorswim one-stop shopping for the tools retail traders need,” said Andy Swan, founder of mytrade.com. “The mytrade.com site features the live insight and exclusive trading lineup of established industry experts such as thinkorswim’s Tom Sosnoff, Scott Sheridan, Tim Knight and many others.”

thinkorswim also published its summer edition of its thinkmoney magazine. With articles ranging from professional option know-how unavailable anywhere else to humor that pokes fun at itself and the industry, thinkmoney is still free to all thinkorswim clients. “We push the envelope with our magazine just like we do our trading platform. Our customers have fun with it and it has become one of our strongest pieces to define our brand and leadership in the online trading world,” said Tom Sosnoff, President of thinkorswim.

Since the mytrade.com acquisition was made late last year, thinkorswim has added a new profile-community section for micro-blogs, included the mytrade.com all-stars section, created the ability to share ideas with individual thinkorswim users, and allowed mytrade.com users to be able to establish their own web-pages.

About thinkorswim, Inc.

thinkorswim, Inc., the brokerage arm of thinkorswim Group Inc. (Nasdaq: SWIM - News), is a leading online brokerage and technology provider focused on offering services and a suite of trading platforms for self-directed options traders, active traders, institutional traders and money managers. thinkorswim customers trade a broad range of products including stock and stock options, index options, futures and futures options, forex, mutual funds and fixed income. thinkorswim provides unique front-end trading platforms that allow customers to trade electronically, sophisticated analytical and research tools, and fast, efficient order execution for even the most complex trading strategies. The products and services offered by thinkorswim have received numerous accolades from third parties including Barron’s ranking as its top rated software-based online broker and best for options traders (2006 and 2007) and second overall in 2008. For more information about thinkorswim visit www.thinkorswim.com or call 1-866-839-1100.

While visiting my buddy Pat in Vegas and using his laser range finder on the golf course, I knew I had to have one. So I asked him the brand name and just placed my order. I had to get the 2nd best one, as the best one, which includes a slope calculator (to add yardage for uphill shots, and take away for downhill shots) is USGA illegal.

And since the site uses UPS to ship and UPS’s HQ is in Louisville, I should have it tomorrow. yay!

At 5:40pm I went to the local AT&T store. They replaced my sim card and that didn’t work. They determined my phone was busted.  They had me call AT&T and request a replacement phone. I did. She then told me that my best bet was to go buy a AT&T Go-Phone and put my sim card in it. I did so and survived on a RAZR (omg I hated it!).

Today, less than 20 hours after requesting my new phone, I received it via FedEx. I used blackberry desktop manager to download everything in my phone….including 1600 emails, 3700 texts, all my settings, contacts, appointments, etc. I then uploaded all that info to the new phone and put the sim card in it.

Presto….

20 hours after my phone busted I had a brand new working exact replica.

I am very impressed with AT&T and RIMM. They made replacing my phone as easy as possible and gave me all the tools I needed to get back to be addicted to my phone, all within 24 hours. Wow!

My goal with mytrade is to match or surpass this level of support for our users. If you can’t keep your users happy, you don’t deserve to be successful.

Most of my life I’ve been called lucky by peers and friends. For a while there was even a name for a mysterious force that caused everything to work out for myself and my brother Andy–we called it Swan Factor. That was also the name of our first corporation, that did very well

I do not, however, believe luck exists.  I believe in  chance, probability and randomness, but the concept of luck goes beyond that to say that randomness somehow favors (or disfavors the case of bad luck) you. Chance doesn’t care.

While most of the things that “happen to us” in life are a result of our actions, many are not at all.

The one constant in life is that we have a choice of how to plan for and react to life and its many twists and turns. The key is doing so with a positive attitude and a smart game-plan.

I’ve always been a pretty optimistic person. And while I’ve had some curve-balls thrown at me–hell I’ve been hit by a few pitches–I always do my best to find the silver lining, accept the bad and pursue the good.

Chance favors no one, so luck does not exist. But if you are optimistic, happy, and try, others will see you as ‘lucky’.

”
You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months.
The eyes of the world are upon you…
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.
”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower

National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va

So I decided to correct this and look it up. Thanks to an article over at wikipedia about the physics of bikes, I finally get it, and would like to share it with you:

• A bike, moving or not, cannot balance if the steering is locked.
• Moving the front wheel is what allows us to balance the bike.
• The faster the bike is moving, the more influence the front wheel’s movements have on balance.

So, balancing a stationary bike is actually possible, but will require huge perfectly correct front wheel movements. As the bike goes faster, balancing is easier and easier as smaller and smaller front wheel turns are needed to adjust the balance.

And just to show you that balancing a stationary bike is possible (notice the enourmous angle on the front wheel and the many corrections needed), here is a video:

Although I’m a couple weeks in my fitness kick, I’m taking a before photo of my abs. I stumbled across the 8-min abs video on youtube. I just finished my first 8 minute session. Let me tell you, 8 mins is a long time to do abs lol, but I made it through and am excited to see how cut I can get. We’ll see. Here is the before picture, taken today:

I’ll keep you posted….

Now, with a free account at twitter and a cell phone, you can get instant stock quotes anytime, free!

Just join twitter (takes 20 seconds), then ‘follow’ mytrade (by typing in “follow mytrade”). Mytrade will automatically follow you within 1-2 minutes. Once you get that notification that mytrade is following you, you’re ready to get your free quotes

To send twitter a text message, just send to 40404. Here is what you should send:

“d mytrade aapl” = you’ll get a quote on apple stock instantly

“d mytrade aapl msft dell ebay” = you’ll get quotes on all 4 companies instantly

You can even set up a watchlist to get 3 automatic quotes throughout the day (morning, midday, after close)

Like so:

“d mytrade watch aapl” = you’ll get updates on AAPL 3 times a day

“d mytrade watch qqqq ebay yhoo”  you’ll get updates on those 3 tickers, 3 times a day

To turn off automatic updates on a stock, just send:

“d mytrade stop qqqq” to stop updates on qqqq.

Or if you want to turn them all off, just send:

“d mytrade stopall”

You gotta love the combination of twitter for text and thinkorswim for quotes, and mytrade for bringing it all together