Sneak Peek – One Step Closer…
It’s about time for another update on how we are progressing here at gTrade, and we are making some great advancements I really want to share with you. It has been a little while since our last update – but we do have an excuse being holiday season and all.
As some people are visiting this blog for the first time, I will do a quick recap on what gTrade is: we are a Web 2.0 company that promotes technology start-ups. We represent the next generation securities exchange: not just trading conventional equities, but enabling everyday investors to purchase shares in companies that have not yet listed publicly. As opposed to traditional venture capital, gTrade brings a start-up company to the collective attention of millions of Internet users, letting the people decide in a start-up’s future by investing their own money.
Alright, back to the platform – to wet your appetite a little, I have taken some screenshots of the trading platform. We have tried to keep the interface clean and simple, and responsive like a fat-client side application. This has been achieved through using Jquery and good old AJAX (well AJAJ – Asynchronous JavaScript and JSON).
The first page you see at login is your ‘Dashboard’ – your one-stop-shop to do everything and go anywhere on the trading platform. Our ‘Update’s box at the top of the dashboard is a personalised news feed for you. It will show updates for such things as update on the companies you have invested in, their twitter feeds (and other Web 2.0 news feed technologies), up coming Initial Public Offerings and gTrade announcements.
gTrade Dashboard Screenshot
We have also given you the ability to create ‘Watchlists’ to monitor listings on the platform that may be of interest to you. You can then subscribed to RSS feeds for each or all of these watchlists and monitor then from anywhere on the net.
Those with a keen eye may have noticed a little box called ‘SmartBox’ – stay tuned, I will go into more detail in a future posting.
On the right hand side of the page there is a ‘Context Area’ box – this changes depending upon what page you are on and which stock you are looking at. This gives you a quick look at fast information – such as market quotes, links, events and historic transactions.
gTrade Buy Transaction Screenshot
The above screen shot is an example of a buy transaction. Here you can see Apple Inc stock is being purchase – at an extremely low price 
When the company name or stock code is being typed, an autocomplete box slides down to assist with company selection. Once selected, the context area is loaded with information about the select listing. This gives you an instantaneous update on the company and assists you in making a more informed decision with the right information at the right time.
You have the option to buy at a set price or fill the order as quickly as possible by using the ‘buy at market price’ function. This function will buy the next available stock that becomes available provided you are at the head of the queue – great if you want to jump in quickly just before you think a company is going to go up in value. You can also set the validity duration for the order – how long untill it expires. This can be from 1 hour to 29 days.
To give you a hand, an estimated order total is calculated for you. This is a rough estimation and can deviate greatly if you choose market price transaction – this is because you can buy stock at any price.
So when is this becoming available to the public? Soon!! We are working very hard on making the platform as stable, reliable and have greater cross-browser compatibility. We are doing some internal testing at the moment and ironing out the browser incompatibilities. A ‘game’ version with pretend money and companies will be announced in the not too distant future to help with beta testing – you can subscribe from our homepage – http://www.gtradenet.com
Till next time,
Guy
