As a startup, Stock Rover evolved quite a bit over the course of this year, both as a service and as a company. Before charging headlong into what is sure to be another busy and dynamic year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what we accomplished in 2014 and share with you some of our goals for 2015.
Here are a few highlights from this year…
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In January we launched our paid Premium service, while still maintaining a high-quality free version of the program called Basic. After several years of development, this was a major step forward for our business. By monetizing our service, we have secured its longevity, so we can continue to bring you excellent investment research tools for years to come. If only we had a digital dollar bill we could pin to our wall!
We had multiple product releases throughout the year, each bringing valuable new features as well as the usual software fine-tuning such as:
We’re pleased with the additions. Each of these features can help you with your investing, whether by giving you access to relevant data and analytics, or just by saving you time.
What’s next: As many of you know, we have been hard at work on an improved portfolio manager that will allow you to import a full transaction history, both saving you time and allowing for more trade details and portfolio nuances. This has been a significant development project, but one that will truly bring Stock Rover to the next level. (It’s also a critical step toward brokerage integration, which we know is on many users’ wish lists.)
Other features we plan to add in the coming year are backtesting, a new portfolio rebalancing tool, and a stock scoring system to help rate stocks across multiple factors. We plan to improve the look and feel and ease of use of the Stock Rover app so that the experience of using the product is even better. Similarly, we’ll be refreshing our website with a new design.
In May, we broke out of our usual webinar format to offer live classes to both seasoned and novice investors at the BetterInvesting Space Coast Chapter (BISCC) Investor Education Day in Central Florida. We had a great time! Conference attendees were friendly and engaged, and we greatly enjoyed getting to teach Stock Rover in person.
What’s next: We’ll be teaching two classes at the 2015 InvestEd Conference in Richmond, VA. All are welcome! Register before year’s end for a discount.
In the spring, we settled into a new office site in downtown Boston in the DCU Fintech Center of Excellence, which is a part of Boston’s Workbar network. We also added several new staff positions, including two support staff, three developers (one of whom was one of our summer interns in 2012), as well as a new marketing manager. We were also fortunate to have had three fantastic student interns who wrote excellent, thoughtful articles for our blog and helped us develop our marketing strategies. Thank you Sona, Stephanie, and Alan!
This year we were honored to have been named Editors’ Choice for fundamental stock data in the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Best of the Web series. AAII lauds us for our customizable interface and for having a “wide variety of information not available elsewhere.” Read what else the AAII Computerized Investing editors have to say about us here.
This year we were also featured twice in BetterInvesting Magazine (article tagline: “Data rich site to help dogged investors”) and in Barron’s Electronic Investor column for our Portfolio Trade Planning tool, described in the column as “one of those high-ticket, heavy-lifting techniques hedge funds use, but packaged and priced for individual investors.”
The positive press not only validates our work and our vision, it has also helped many new users find and benefit from our site.
What’s next: Currently we are competing for the Benzinga Fintech Awards, which seeks out “the most innovative companies within the rapidly growing financial technology sector.” We’ll let you know if we win!
In the coming year, we aim to expand our menu of investing tools while continuing to be a dependable and worthy competitor for in-depth and efficient stock research. We also plan to continue creating well-researched, fluff-free blog articles and webinars. Be sure to check our homepage, newsletter, and social media accounts to keep up with us—there’s something new just about every week! As ever, your support, feedback, and engagement have been invaluable to us. We thank you and look forward to serving you in the new year.
