LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we did).
LinkedIn also partnered with StockTwits for the live-tweeting of the company’s earnings. StockTwits’ LinkedIn ticker page includes this stream of information as well as the earnings presentation. → Read More
StockTwits, the mobile finance community currently available on the iPhone, is taking its experience to the Android today.
Like StockTwits for the iPhone, StockTwits for the Android retains many of the same functionalities as the StockTwits community its, allowing users to access realtime stock quotes, financial news and the ability to bookmark stocks on a “Watchlist” or the ability to access stocks on the go. → Read More
It’s been a good start to the year for StockTwits. For starters, as we reported last week, the realtime info-sharing hub for investors and traders, has doubled its monthly visitors since December. It also recently stole Yahoo Finance products exec David Putnam and added Chris Bullock, who was formerly the senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ, as its new VP of Corporate Services.
Today, the information service announced further developments, saying that it will be rolling out a series of discovery tools to allow its users to more easily find people to follow within its growing community. → Read More
StockTwits, a realtime platform for stock traders to share information, has been undergoing a rapid growth spurt of late. According to Quantcast, 465,000 people are now visiting the site per month, which means the company has more than doubled its visitors since early December, when less than 200,000 were checking in to share and trade. This seems largely due to the service’s continuing evolution beyond its TweetDeck roots and creation of its own true investor ecosystem chalk full of video, news and charts — all enabled by an AIR app.
What’s more, the company announced in December that Yahoo would begin pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages, complementing the similar deals it had already forged with CNN, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg.
And now it seems that, while Yahoo is pulling data from its API, StockTwits has been busy pulling senior executives from Yahoo’s staff. (I guess turnabout is fair play?) In yet another victory for a company not named Yahoo, David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management at Yahoo, announced on his blog today that he will be joining StockTwits on April 1 as VP of Product. → Read More
StockTwits, which curates conversations about stocks, nailed down another impressive business development deal today. Yahoo is now pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages – here’s Apple (AAPL) for example. StockTwits has similar deals with CNN, MarketWatch and Bloomberg.
The stream is added under a new area Yahoo is calling Market Pulse, located in the left sidebar of any company page. Here’s the Market Pulse page for Apple, for example. Conversations are in the middle of the page and link back to StockTwits. On the right are trending stocks based on velocity of conversation. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.
In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology. So where is social networking headed next? I make eight predictions below.
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front. Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.
Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment. Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join. I predict this will come before the end of 2012. → Read More
I’ve got to admit it: When it comes to financial advice, I just don’t trust my friends. And I certainly don’t trust random people on Twitter or other social networks. I don’t think I am alone. Most social finance sites have yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Just look at the pivot kaChing just did by renaming itself Wealthfront (and focusing on professional money managers instead of amateurs who outperform. It’s not that I think amateur investors are untrustworthy, it’s just that I don’t know who to trust.
For that reason, among others (I don’t trade stocks), I haven’t really spent much time on StockTwits either. But StockTwits just turned on a new feature a few days ago that finally made it click for me. It lets you follow stocks on Twitter, not just the people talking about them. All of a sudden, it is not about trying to figure out who you trust, it is about getting all the buzz on the stocks and companies you care about in realtime. This ability to follow stocks instead of people is a perfect example of how to take Twitter’s interest graph and put it on steroids. → Read More
What was once a service that simply filtered public company stock related tweets out for traders, and was named accordingly, has since moved far beyond those humble beginnings.
In 2009 they broke off from Twitter, launching their own messaging platform. They acquired a financial news hub early this year, and then launched a private company product as well. Yep, those days as a simple Twitter filter are long behind them.
Cofounder and CEO Howard Lindzon tells us the company had another milestone today – a $4 million venture round from existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. That brings the total capital raised by the company to $8.6 million. → Read More
Twitter-focused stock and trading network StockTwits is making its debut into the mobile space today with a native free iPhone app.
The app includes much of the same functionality as StockTwits’ web site. You can access all of the stock-focused Twitter streams on the app, as well as the stock watch lists. Users can update their own streams of Tweets about stock from the app and follow and view other user profiles on the site. → Read More
StockTwits has built a business out of people tweeting their thoughts and actions around various public stocks. SecondMarket has built a business out of people interested in the buying and selling of various private stocks. It seems only natural to shove the two together. Which is exactly what they’re doing today with a new partnership.
As you may be aware, to send a tweet to StockTwits, you have to append the “$SYMBOL” syntax to your tweet. The same idea will now work with these private stocks that SecondMarket tracks. For example, if you’re interested in TechCrunch stock, you’d tweet your thoughts with “$TCRH” appended on to the tweet. For Facebook, you’d use “$FBOOK“. For Twitter, “$TWIT“. And so on. → Read More
Last year, the Twitter-focused stock and trading network StockTwits acquired Chart.ly, a stock-chart service that was designed specifically for StockTwits. It’s sort of like a Twitpic for stock charts (you can Tweet about a stock with a link to a chart on Chart.ly). But for the most part, StockTwits co- founder Howard Lindzon retained existing Chart.ly’s look and feel for users. Today, Chart.ly is getting a UI makeover and additional features as part of the StockTwits Network.
Chart.ly’s new front page is not just more visually appearing, but navigation is more user-friendly. The startup also features charts from top chartists and creators (an alogrithm highlights the charts based on aggregate number of veiws per user). → Read More
Both CNN Money and MarketWatch have added curated stock and finance tweets to their sites. But they aren’t just showing unfiltered tweets based on a query or hash tag – instead they’ve turned to StockTwits, presumably for more relevant data.
Messages only show up on StockTwits if you add a “$” before a stock symbol, and the company also carefully moderates messages and blocks users who tend to spam. The result is a fairly clear, mess-free stream of rumors and trade information that some obsessed trader types may somehow find useful. At the very least it’s entertaining to read things like “@bradybrown Dammit… I go to a meeting and $AAPL falls off a cliff!!! WTH???” → Read More
We first wrote about Israeli startup eToro way back in 2007 when it launched. Since then investors have put more than $8 million into the company. Today they’ll announce that Social Leverage has led a third round, adding $2.4 million more.
What is eToro? It’s commodity, currency and index trading made fun and social. Yes, you read that correctly. eToro puts the sexy into silver trading. Users make trades via a ridiculously easy (maybe too easy) interface. Start off with fake money and see what you’re made of. Yesterday, for example, I quickly lost about 5% of my fake capital on foolhardy and highly leveraged oil and silver trades when I lost my nerve and bailed out a few minutes after jumping in. Maybe when I abandon my day job and start trading full time I’ll learn to do a little research first.
But I can’t deny that it’s a total blast to use eToro. The service makes buying and selling extremely easy to understand, and users seem to agree. CEO Jonathan Assia tells me that users have traded over $100 billion on eToro to date. The average transaction size, before leverage, is $50. Trades made on the site are public for others to view, and successful traders can get quite a following on the service. → Read More
If you like to trade stocks, chances are you do your research on sites like Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, or even StockTwits to find ideas, and then you go log into your brokerage account to execute a trade. Or maybe you get distracted by a dancing bear on YouTube and never buy or sell that stock.
Online discount brokerage Zecco wants to make sure you can trade anywhere on the Web, whenever the feeling hits you. Today, it is releasing Zap Trade with StockTwits, and as a Firefox add-on. On StockTwits, there will now be a Z button which will launch a Zecco trading widget. The widget allows customers to place stock trades without going back to Zecco. Trade, Tweet, Repeat. → Read More
It was only a few months ago that StockTwits, a real time platform for stock traders to share information, broke away from Twitter and forged ahead on its own. Part of that separation was the creation of a desktop AIR application that created an entire investor ecosystem, including video, news and charts. Now those features are appearing on the StockTwits site itself, at beta.stocktwits.com. For now the company will run the old and new sites side by side and give users a period of time to get comfortable with the beta site.
Co-founder Howard Lindzon suggests five things that new StockTwits users will want to do on the new site: watch the suggested user stream, peruse charts shared by other users, check out specific filtered ticker pages (example), watch the 24-hour StockTwits TV stream, or contribute your own content. → Read More
StockTwits, a real time platform for the sharing of information around financial markets, has made it’s second acquisition – a financial news site called Abnormal Returns, founded by Tadas Viskanta. This follows the acquisition of Chart.ly last year.
Abnormal Returns is a small but influential financial news site that includes curated news as well as original content about the financial markets and stocks. StockTwits is taking that platform and adding its real time news and information feed from the StockTwits network. You can see the new feed on the right side of the Abnormal Returns site.
Viskanta will become a StockTwits employee and will continue to manage the Abnormal Returns website and service. → Read More
Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios.
Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look. → Read More
We just noticed something in the App Store: An official app made by the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (a.k.a. NASDAQ), the American stock exchange, has been approved. That itself is interesting, but perhaps even more interesting is a key functionality of the app is to highlight tweets about various NASDAQ stocks.
The free app is called NASDAQ Portfolio Manager [App Store Link], and it’s really slick. As you’d expect, you can use it to look up various stocks and get access to real-time data when the market is open. It also has some impressive stock charting options. The main individual stock screen has all the data you’d expect (highs, lows, etc), but if you rotate your iPhone to the side, you get a full chart with a variety of viewing option. And if you run your finger over this chart, you can pinpoint stock prices at various dates. → Read More
The S&P 500 is up 58 percent from its lowest point last March, the worst of the economic recession seems to be behind us, and even perennial stock market bear Jim Grant is calling for a barn-burner of a recovery, yet predictions of the next stock-market crash are already here. And you can find them on Twitter. Individual traders love to talk stocks on Twitter so much that they have given rise to a whole offshoot service, StockTwits. In fact, some argue that Twitter is becoming a pump-and-dump playground. But it is really no different than the Internet stock boards of old, which mixed honest financial discussion with attempts to manipulate the market with misinformation.
Either way, traders are flocking to Twitter because if there is one area where real-time information is really valuable, it is in trading stocks. The question is, who do you trust and who should you listen to? There are countless stocktwits who are now being joined by more professional prognosticators. One is BAM Investor, which markets its financial model to hedge funds. BAM stands for Behavioral Analysis Of Markets. It uses fractal theory (and the Fibonacci sequence!) to predict emotional mood swings in the market.
About five days ago it predicted that the current stock market rally would crash by 50 percent. It also thinks that Crude Oil is heading down to $56/barrel. But it is bullish on natural gas, predicting a 400% “melt-up”. → Read More
StockTwits has been one of the success stories for building on the Twitter platform. The service, which leverages the power of the Twitter community and its real-time aspect to generate investment ideas, has thousands of people each day now using the $ tags it invented to talk stocks over the network. But to get into the big time in this field, co-founder Howard Lindzon knew the service had to go to the next level. And now it is with StockTwits Desktop.
If you’ve used TweetDeck, StockTwits Desktop will be very familiar to you. That’s because Lindzon and fellow co-founder Soren Macbeth created their client with TweetDeck very much in mind, realizing that people would know how to use it (Lindzon is also an investor in TweetDeck). But StockTwits Desktop’s functionality extends far beyond that of TweetDeck, as what it’s really doing is creating an entire investor ecosystem within this app. → Read More
