Company History
In the late 1990s two trading friends found themselves deluged with requests for help about how to invest and trade in the stock market. One was a trading manager who had started investing in college and migrated to day trading. The other was a technical analyst who had learned about stocks as a teenager.
The trader approached the technical analyst with an idea: with so many people wanting to learn how to invest and trade, why not put together a workshop on the stock market? It could be fun to teach again and in a subject for which they both had a passion and unique approach.
The technical analyst had retired from the business world a decade earlier and thought the trader's idea was rather wild at first. After all, there were hundreds of books and seminars on the stock market. What could they do that would be different?
How We Help
TechniTrader® is part of the growing number of corporations that are taking steps to help heal Planet Earth. One excellent way to help our planet is to drive less. When TechniTrader® teaches people how to trade stocks from their home offices, students are helping to save the earth by not driving to work.
Another way TechniTrader® is helping promote green earth solutions is to teach students about the new earth-friendly technologies that are coming to market that will provide alternative energy solutions, water saving products, energy conservation, waste management alternatives to wood and other limited resource commodities, improved food production, and food distribution products.
By investing in these new young companies, investors help the next generation of corporations that will change our future to a much better, safer place to live. When you invest in an earth-friendly new technology, you provide incentive for others to invest as well.
Learning to trade the stock market is one of the steps you can take in healing our planet.
NYSE Visit
Our Founders were invited to a private tour of the New York Stock Exchange and here are their remarks about the tour:
We thoroughly enjoyed our private tour of NYSE. What struck us most was the flow of trading on the exchange. Activity is fast and participants trade stocks everywhere at once, but there was an orderliness that doesn't show on TV. It was especially poignant as we watched the floor traders and specialists because we realized that we were watching something that was slowly coming to an end.
The NYSE is changing to an automated trading system similar to the NASDAQ SuperMontage and that foretells the end of the specialist. This is just one of many ways the NYSE is changing to meet the demands of the new millennium.
Many changes have occurred in the first decade of the 21st century. The sell short uptick rule has been eliminated, electronic trading is expanding and growing at a phenomenal rate, and quantitative derivatives are causing ripple effects beyond the boundaries of the investment instrument for which they were written. The 21st century has seen 3 huge bubble-to-busts in less than a decade: the 2000 collapse of the tech stock boom, the 2007 collapse of the real estate boom, and the 2008 collapse of the commodity boom.
Clearly, the impact of large lot trading activity has forever changed the market since the elimination of the rule of 3 in 1997. Electronic trading creates wonderful opportunities but also creates huge challenges for the SEC and other regulators to write new laws to control speculation and make a fair market for everyone.
We also enjoyed a tour of the NYSE boardroom, a vast room saturated with history and power. It was easy to imagine the NYSE Seat Holders of long ago and today discussing business in that room.
The day ended with a trip to the stock market archives, a fascinating place that holds the history of the market. We were intrigued to read a book written in the late 1800s about the stock market. It spoke of volatility, irrational buying, and speculation beyond comprehension. It reminded us that stocks and the market change over time, but human emotions remain the same.
The next day, we listened to an SEC officer as he discussed the changes coming to the marketplace and gained invaluable insight to the next decade of trading. What was prevalent everywhere we went was a sense of a coordinated effort to keep the market a fair trading environment. What concerned the specialists and SEC officers most and what they wanted us to convey back to our students was that the market is solid, it is fair, and that they work hard to keep it that way.
We went away from the tour of NYSE with a greater appreciation for the floor traders, market makers, and their role in the day-to-day activities of the stock market.
-Martha Stokes, C.M.T.