One of our customers that I've been chatting with quite a bit in CollabInvest is BillD1957.

To my pleasant surprise, he put together an introductory article about Personal Stock Monitor which I have attached below.

As Bill mentions, to date CollabInvest has primarily been used as a way to have in-software chats with Anatoly and I. We had always imagined that our users would establish connections using the Find Friends link and collaborate in real-time in the software. This is how we use it when discussing trading ideas.Unfortunately, as you've noticed CollabInvest does not feel very alive and to date few have used the real time collaboration features.

This is going to change very soon with some new features we're bringing online next week, which we hope you will all find useful. 

Beyond CollabInvest, we have a number of features planned out for the software which we will introduce as we develop them. Some features, such as the next/prev arrow idea Bill suggested took very little time to implement and we were happy to do it. (Open a chart and see the two arrows next to the refresh button next to the ticker symbol at the bottom)

Other features, unfortunately, can take much much longer to develop. We very much would like to develop alerting on technical indicator values and portfolio value/XIRR over time calculations. These two are huge projects which will probably not get done for quite some time.

We typically prioritize features based on what our customers tell us they want. If we receive a particular feature from a large number of users, it gets priority.

There are other feature requests that only a few customers have mentioned.One such feature is setting alerts on total portfolio gain, loss, value, etc. (the total lines). This is one that we would have gotten around to "eventually" but it was going to take several days of fulltime effort to make happen. A customer, Dr. Mark Morris, for whom that particular feature was critical and time sensitive, opted to fund adding that feature to the next release. As a result, in the next release of Personal Stock Monitor and Personal Stock Streamer, you will be able to set alerts on total lines.

As I was mentioning to Dr. Morris yesterday, one of the challenges we face is that we actually rarely hear about your experiences. We are often left guessing as to what you would like to see and what you would think is useful. So, if there's a feature or improvement you would like to see to the software, please post them to the collabinvest forum so we can start a discussion. Obviously, we can't develop everything, but unless we hear from you, we won't know what you're looking for and more importantly we won't understand the /why/ behind the request.

Finally, if there's a feature you would like to see in the software sooner rather than much later for your brokerage, money management firm, trading group or other purpose, and you are willing to fund the development, please contact us.

(In a future release of CollabInvest I hope to add the ability for you to post your own blog articles like this one on the site in your own area. More on that later.)