Western Railroad Discussion > Stock Market Trends and Trainorders.com

I have noticed some interesting traffic trends on Trainorders.com during the past couple of weeks that I thought I would share.

When the stock market has bad days, traffic to Trainorders is extremely high. On some days we have been hitting record 10,000 user sessions or visits. This is rare as summers are traditionally slow traffic wise. My projection was around 8500 max per day. I was way off.

The negative side for the site is when the stock market is down, fewer people register for new accounts. During June and the first few days of July I was seeing 5-10 new registrations a day. On bad stock market days we blank out or see one registration. Wednesday when the market rebounded I saw three new registrations.

From what I can tell when the market is performing poorly, people tend to be online more and check market prices often. When they get done checking their portfolios they make a point of checking out Trainorders. That equals more traffic to the site. To compensate for the situation I have purchased additional bandwidth to keep our service up.

I think what is happening is people are watching their retirement investments sink and thus feel instantly poor and are immediately frugal with their spending. When the market does good they somehow feel they can afford the $7 registration fee. I don’t know what else to attribute this bizarre trend to but sure would make an interesting study.

For now and probably until the end of summer I have ceased spending towards improvements. When things stabilize I will once again return to adding new features and improving the ones we have.

A major change that I may make this summer is a change in hosting providers. VC.net has been good to me during the past 5 years and I hate to leave them. However, their distance from the internet backbone, prohibits them from offering me low cost bandwidth. Although this sounds strange, there are long distance charges for transmitting data over large geographical spans. By locating the server on the main Pacific Coast fiber line in Downtown Los Angeles I can save quite a bit as those distance charges are eliminated. At the current rate of growth, Trainorders will be averaging a full T-1 of data transfer during the day and evening hours.


Todd Clark
Trainorders.com

Create a link to a financial page in the discussion area..thus they can get their train stuff and market stuff all at the same time....

Sounds like the start of a thesis on internet use trends. Combine the Trainorders.com data with the usage data from a variety of websites, both investment related and not, to see if there are corelations such as the apparent one between Dow Jones Industrial Average performance and Trainorders.com visits.

In addition to the relationship of the market links to Trainorders useage, why not tie in a user grid for Ebay railroadiana...That way we can see if the participation in the RR auctions, the gossip here, and the end of the world as we know it in the financial Markets have a relationship.

or in today's terms, 2 cents of off-ledger expenses booked as 2 million dollars of revenue in the current quarter....

My theory is that as things slow, people look for diversion. With the WWW on almost all workplace desktops (shhhh!), it's the modern version of a trip to the store, lake or golf course on company time.

When things get spectacular in the market, many people are now watching and talking about it in the workplace. That gets them on the www, then once they are there, TO is only a click away.

When things are good, the discussions and activities are more business-as-usual and mostly do not involve the web.

your mileage may vary....

Todd C wrote: "When the stock market has bad days, traffic to Trainorders is extremely high"

.uuhhhh, I can offer a theory on this one: all the extre hits are from Bob E in Cincinnati, trying to forget about the misery his falling stocks are causing him! Some of us drown our sorrows in a bottle (the hard stuff, not Diet Dr. Pepper) and some pay a visit to Trainorders.com. To each his own, right, Brother Eisthen?


;-)

WSC

I guess you want to have something pleasant on the screen while you watch the stock ticker streaming across the bottom....