In this review, we will be taking a look at Clay Trader, an online investment chatroom that specializes mostly in penny stocks, and places emphasis on educational material, as opposed to direct investing advice.
We will first get to know the founder of Clay Trader, and learn his story, before exploring the various services and options provided by the site. These services are quite extensive, and they include chat rooms, a podcast, a newsletter, and a forum. We will examine all of them individually before giving a verdict on the merits of this particular website. With that in mind, let us get started.
Who is Clay?
Though the name of this website may be a pun on the common term ‘day trader’, the meaning behind its name goes one step further, as it also references its founder, a man named Clay. No surname is in circulation, since Clay’s approach to his services is laid-back and approachable, a feeling that permeates the entire Clay Trader community.
His story is a pretty interesting one, and it has shaped the way he trades profoundly. After finishing college, Clay started day trading, without much in the way of knowledge. He sold his stock in a mutual fund in order to get his initial trading capital. At first, he had some success in trading, but after a while, a stock he’d invested heavily in came tumbling down, and Clay lost a lot of money.
He says this mistake was due to the fact that he was trading based on emotions, and he tries to instill this experience into all of the members of Clay Trader. Instead of trading on emotions, he advises making investment decisions based on cold, hard facts, as contained in graphs and charts.
Another aspect that sets Clay apart from his contemporaries who also run investment chat rooms is the fact that he is in no way connected to Wall Street. This is precisely the foundation upon which the community cohesion on Clay Trader is based, since everyone is just a regular person, down to earth and approachable, just like Clay himself.
What services does Clay Trader provide?
As we have already mentioned, Clay Trader offers a variety of services to its members, and these are mostly for educational purposes. Arguably the main feature of the website is the chat room functionality, as this is where most of the day-to-day activity takes place.
Chat Rooms
This chat room is part of a larger subscription scheme called ‘The Inner Circle’. It includes the Lounge, the Under $1 and Over $1 chat rooms, as well as access to the Forum, the Newsletter, and the Weekly Power Scan, a series of annotated graphs compiled by the site.
The Traders’ Lounge is a chat room designed to host informal discussions among visitors, as well as to allow them to network with one another. It is mostly active after trading hours, and it is the basis for developing the community spirit, since not a lot of highly technical conversations take place here.
The Under $1 and Over $1 chat rooms are both structured inthe same way, except for the difference in the type of stocks discussed within. As we have mentioned previously, Clay Trader focuses mostly on penny stocks, since these require the least amount of starting capital, and can therefore be purchased by regular people, as opposed to professional investors and traders.
Forums
The General Forums cover all aspects related to the markets. There are many topics already available, but all subscribers are allowed to create their own topics and have in-depth discussions with other users on the platform as well. However, these Forums are not widely visited, and their real value lies in the archived topics, which were discussed some time ago, but which are a vibrant source of information and knowledge.
The Power Scans Weekly Newsletter is a weekly update on the market trends Clay considers important. It is sent to your inbox every week, and it consists of various graphs and charts organized in a specific way. Each Power Scan comprises six to eight graphs, with annotations by Clay in which he gives insight into the stocks’ past performance, as well as his predictions for the future.
These graphs are quite complicated for a beginner to make sense of, but that’s what the Clay Trader community is there for, since you can just ask for clarification in one of th chat rooms, or even send a personal message to Clay himself, since that is precisely the sort of environment Clay Trader strives to foster.
Clay Trader in short
If we were to sum up Clay Trade briefly, we would say that it is a community of down to earth users who want to try their hand at investing in low-cost stocks, in order to learn as much about the markets as possible. It is a good choice for beginners, since the stocks are inexpensive and relatively risk-free.
