Digital Dave

Done, sir, done! I recently pushed YieldKeeper to Apple.

My hope is that this journal will help investors on OS X who are just starting (students, amateurs) and experienced traders who are looking for a better way to keep an eye on their activity. There is nothing like this on the app store right now.

I’ve been a long term trader for the majority of the last 9 years. I’ve also been very active and traded on a daily basis. This is built by someone who was wanting something far friendlier than existing options (spreadsheets, trading logs, broker reports). You don’t have to set this up. I’ve been using this over the last few months every day I trade. I’d fire YieldKeeper up in the morning and as I entered and completed positions I tossed them into YieldKeeper with notes and screenshots. At the end of the day I went through and rated trades that I felt offered a good learning experience. If I was trading long term, I would simply slow that process down.

Trade to trade well, not to make money. Trading well requires a diligent investor who studies a continually changing market and learns from their trading activity, which is why simulating/paper trading is stressed on new and even experienced trader. Personally, I have something I call a Penalty Box. If I make 3 bad trades in a row, I’m out. I’m simulating for a day or two and that is non-negotiable. Something is wrong and I want to figure out what it is.

So here we are! I’ll announce a release date soon.

Yes, I was working on a game but I was having a brutal time designing it. The complexity started to enter a not-so-fun zone and I refuse to release something that doesn’t raise the bar above Colorflys and meet my goals for depth/fun. I’ll get back to it, or a different game design, after the following project.

I’ve been interested in finance for quite some time. It started when I came back from deployment in Iraq in 2003 and instead of spending the savings haphazardly, like many ended up doing, I jumped on board with Morgan Stanley and had a financial advisor manage it since I was new to finance and I had very little time to devote to learning it. When I left the corps in 2004 I took the money out and began managing it myself through Scottrade.

I’ve always had a problem plaguing my trading — a solid way to track how I was doing. These days my primary goal is not to make money- it’s to trade well. Study, make solid decisions about why you enter a position, set a reasonable risk/reward scenario and then execute the plan. After the plan is executed figure out what went right and what didn’t. Study more. Reduce mistakes. Visually see how you’re performing. Become a better trader. If you solely focus on making $X/day you will be in a huge bucket of pain in a market that is currently accepting plenty of prisoners.

So that brings me to YieldKeeper. Many folks, myself included, keep track of things through reports via a broker and/or an excel spreadsheet. Neither method is conducive in doing the things that I wanted. You can do some fancy things in excel but it’s going to take a lot of time to refine a solid experience and even then it’s not really good enough – I’ve done it several times and have never been happy. I wanted something that I can wedge into my process with minimal impact while allowing me to keep track of each position I go in/out of, track how I’m doing overall and give me the ability to study from my prior trades.

So in the next few weeks I’ll start introducing you to YieldKeeper. Right now I’m more concerned with tailoring a great experience than releasing it so I have no ETA on a release. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. Toss me an email if you’re a trader and would like to provide some user testing. Finally, yieldkeeper.com is live.

Q. Will this be coming to iOS?
A. I’m primarily developing this with a specific flow in mind. I remain open-minded about iOS but that isn’t the current goal.

Q. [yours here] – Feel free to contact me with any questions or things you’d like to see