So we know that celebrities such as Miley Cyrus (mileycyrus), Shaquille O’Neal (THE_REAL_SHAQ), Lindsay Lohan (sevinnyne6126), Ashton Kutcher (aplusk), Snoop Dogg (snoopdogg) and Alyssa Milano (Alyssa_Milano) have flocked to Twitter as a channel to express their thoughts and ambitions and (whether intentional or not) allow us all to laugh at her tweets.
We also know that many commentators are claiming that Twitter may be “the” new tool for journalist looking for eye witnesses and scoops on stories.
But how is the financial industry tackling the latest and greatest social networking tool. Well – I am happy to report that from the sell side to the buy side it is being embraced and they are taking the technology beyond just being a marketing tool.
Sites such as The Motley Fool and SaneBull used Twitter as a channel to communicate stock prices and trade strategies. And Twitter’s emergence as legitimate influence on equities not only stems from investors who share their predictions 24/7, but also those who search investor sentiment by searching for stocks by merely typing in the stock symbol prefaced by a dollar sign (i.e. $bhp or $goog).
But let’s take that one step further. StockTwits has become one of the first dedicated open twitter communities generating investment ideas and information. Describing themselves as a “Bloomberg for the little guy” this dedicated twitter services allows you to add stocks and save them to your own portfolio as well as limiting the conversation around your stocks to your most trusted sources.
Chart.ly, partially built by the guys at StockTwits, lets users upload stock market charts – which are the lifeblood of many traders –and share them via Twitter with a shortened Chart.ly URL. When you upload the chart you include the stock symbol, some tags, and the tweet you’d like to send out and this is then simulcast to the StockTwits community.
As far as the online brokers are concerned Trade Monster, a next-generation online broker in the US, has become the first online broker to integrate Twitter, with tradeShare. With one click from the trading platform, trade MONSTER customers can now post micro-blogs onto Twitter.
PollyTrade has taken this one further by linking your Twitter & E-Trade accounts so you can execute stock trades just by tweeting. Believe it or not, if you were to buy 100 shares of Google you merely tweet “@pollytrade buy 100 shares goog” from your Twitter account and voila !! After communicating with E-Trade, PollyTrade tweets back your order status. This is typically a brokerage order number, but if something went wrong, you’ll receive an error message.
And of course if the sell side is embracing the technology the buy side are looking for ways to capitalise on it as well with Twitter entering the world of algorithmic trading.
StreamBase Systems has just announced that its CEP platform’s has connectivity to Twitter which allows its applications to ingest and analyse news emerging from the buzzing social media platform. It can also “crowd source” to help gauge people’s sentiment towards a particular event or stock. “It’s really useful for sentiment analysis, which traders can then use to help them make trading decisions,” he adds.
The sad point about all of the above is unfortunately here in Australia no one has embraced Twitter as a tool for thier financial services offering – well, not beyond the purposes of self promotion. And considering online share trading is the domain of the big banks it is unlikely this wonder of social networking will do anything special, if anything at all…
P.S. talking about shameless self promotion has got me all excited so feel free to check out my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/iaspinall
Good read, thanks.