Stocks & Commodities V. 26:13 (48-53): Interview: Lane Mendelsohn Of TradingEducation.com by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

Interview: Lane Mendelsohn Of TradingEducation.com by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

Lane Mendelsohn, the publisher of TradingEducation.com, has been involved in the financial software industry on a full-time basis since 1993 and became an associate member of the Market Technicians Association in 2001. He has helped educate thousands of individual traders to become more successful through his expertise with trading software. In 2005, his vision for utilizing the Internet as an educational tool for traders resulted in the launch of www.TradingEducation.com. Since then he has been instrumental in launching several other, advertisersupported, free educational websites dedicated to helping stock, forex and futures traders. Is the name somehow familiar? It should be. His father is trading software developer Louis Mendelsohn, an early proponent for intermarket analysis, who has been in the industry for more than 30 years.

STOCKS & COMMODITIES Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan (JG) and Staff Writer Bruce Faber (BF) spoke to Lane Mendelsohn on January 23, 2008, via a conference call.

How did you get interested in trading? Or was there never a time when you weren’t?

It was an interesting and H unique way to get into such an exciting industry. As you know, my father, Lou Mendelsohn, is one of the pioneers of this industry and has been involved for decades. When I first got interested in what he was doing, I didn’t even know I was interested. He was selling the Profit Taker futures trading software, and it was on five and a quarter–inch floppy disks. At the time, in the early 1980s, you could not buy preformatted disks. Someone had to format each disk and make sure there were no problems with it. You could then copy the software onto the disks to send out to your customer. It was not a stimulating job but it had to be done, and each disk had to be done, one by one. I was getting five cents a disk doing that on nights and weekends. That was my first job, and that’s when my father and I started working together.

JG: How old were you?

I was six. At the time, we had a ranch just outside of Tampa and the office was located on the property. So anytime I wanted to go to the office, all I had to do was take a little walk over the bridge and through the woods, and I was at the office. That was a great learning laboratory for me. I was listening to customers receiving technical support. I heard my dad do business worldwide.

There has been nothing else that I have done in my career. I am young, but I have been working at this for quite a while now. This is the only thing that has ever grabbed my attention. Nothing else that I have seen or experienced has captured my attention like this has.

JG: That’s amazing.

So that is how I started doing some of the more menial tasks. I had a pretty important title at one point — I was the operations manager of facilities. That meant I took out the trash, cleaned the bathrooms, and did what had to get done. But again, my father was teaching me the value of a dollar, and giving me an opportunity to work in the office.

When I was about 12 or 13, my father started taking me to industry conferences, and meetings with his colleagues and friends in the industry. I met a lot of great people. Some of the people I met during those years I have developed professional relationships with now. That is how I formed TradingEducation.com, by reaching out to people I originally met through my father.