AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

Given the fact AGORACOM attracted over 1.1 million annual unique visitors again in 2009, I think it’s safe to assume our site represents about as good a sample of small-cap investors as any on the web.  As such, here is some information I fished out of our Google Analytics on the browser and operating systems used by small-cap investors:

BROWSERS

Internet Explorer is still the unequivocal leader with > 70% share of small-cap investors.  Personally, I abandoned IE a couple of years ago for Firefox and have recently moved onto Google’s Chrome due to better speed and all the add-ons they provide.  If you’re an AGORACOM member/visitor, you should take 3 minutes to download each browser and test it out. It certainly won’t hurt and can definitely help.

Of slight concern is the fact that 20% of AGORACOM IE users are still using IE6.  If you’re an AGORACOM member/visitor that is still using IE6, do yourself a big favor and upgrade to IE8 for a significantly better browsing experience and security. Don’t just take my word for it, on January 19, 2010 Microsoft came out and advised customers to keep using IE but to upgrade from IE6.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

Microsoft (Windows) is running away as the operating system of choice for small-cap investors (mine too). I expected a big spread but 91.5% is far greater than I expected.  The big questions are:

• Are Mac users generally not as big into finance? OR
• Are Mac users big into finance but – due to their tech savvy – are they using cutting edge sites such as StockTwits?  I’m very curious as to what percentage of StockTwits visitors are Mac users. Howard?

Mobile operating systems are on the grid but we personally have a lot of room to improve, which is good news for the mobile applications we’ve been working on over the past few months.  Look for big mobile news to come out of AGORACOM in the next 30 days.

Of those small-cap investors using Windows while surfing AGORACOM, the further operating system breakdown is as follows. Am I the only one surprised to see Windows 7 at < 1%?  If I had to guess, I would have estimated 5% uptake of Windows 7 at this stage.  Clearly, small-cap investors like to stick with that works – including me who plans to be on XP for quite a while.

BROWSER AND OPERATING SYSTEM COMBINATIONS

Finally, here are the top broswer/operating system combos of small-cap investors.  Not surprisingly, Microsoft dominates here as well – but put me down in the Firefox/Windows group, though I have recently switched camps into Chrome/Windows, which makes up less than 2% of small-cap investors (ooh, I’m so cutting edge 🙂 ).

CONCLUSION

I hope you found the above information to be helpful. I’d love to hear any questions or comments, especially from AGORACOM members/visitors.

Regards,
George