Review: Profit.ly

I think profit.ly's greatest attribute is that it provides a well laid out design that lets you keep track of your own trades. The innovation comes with the community surrounding profit.ly although I find this aspect still very much in the development phase in terms of reaching a greater purpose. It might be mildly interesting to see what people have been trading in the past but ultimately it usually isn't helpful.

I think one of the motivations of the site is for Tim Sykes to advertise the gains of his subscribers, which I certainly don't blame him for and its a perfectly fine motivation to have. The problem is just that there is so much more potential for the site and the concept that I can only hope is being worked towards. Rather than just be a site for Tim's followers, it needs to be a site for the average trader and I just don't see a whole lot of appeal for them right now. Furthermore, one of the great flaws is that people can post fake trades if they choose to do so which may be motivated by a desire to get a pat on the back from Tim.

I have actually found profit.ly useful during tax season though because it gives me a general sense of my P&L as well as the time-frame of my trades. If you submit all of your trades you can use profit.ly just to double check your filings to make sure there are no major discrepancies. Unfortunately, profit.ly isn't flawless yet so you can't actually use it as a surefire method of tracking trades for tax purposes, but it's user friendly design certainly lends a helping hand when doing so.

Some quick suggestions: Perhaps require a certain percentage of reported trades to be verified? Have certain benchmarks of verified trades trigger a free 24 hours of the premium stats on Profit.ly?

In order to make the community aspect more useful, there should be a way to encourage helpful hints. The best trade posts include comments that explain why the trader went in and out. Maybe feature such helpful posts somewhere on the site, or allow people to vote posts as helpful to create a new category of ranking?