Roger Ehrenberg. Paul Kedrosky. Howard Lindzon.
If those names mean anything to you, you’re already fairly hip to the world of US financial bloggers. If, on the other hand, you’re drawing a blank - you’re probably based in the UK and spend very little time poring over RSS feeds and even less time on Twitter.
Sweeping generalizations, of course, but there is a significant cultural divide between US and UK financial bloggers - in so far as there are any of the latter. (No Fintag, we didn’t forget you - although even you seem to wish you were NY-based).
US-based financial bloggers run the gamut of venture capitalists, day traders, hedge fund managers and various combinations thereof; these bloggers tend also to be early-adopters,fond of obsessed with technology and gadgets and generally on the bleeding-edge of all things web 2.0.
Which brings us to Soren Macbeth, a currency speculator with a blog (of course) and an affinity for “currency markets, global macro, probability, statistics, maths” and Twitter geekiness. Macbeth is also the creator of Stock Tweets, which is an attempt to track any discussions of stocks or ETFs happening on Twitter.
Why? Says Macbeth:
The idea is to collect (stock) data that people share on Twitter anyway. Originally, I thought about doing sentiment analysis on a particular ticker, but that’s just one idea. There a ton of things you can do - right now I’m just collecting data and getting people involved.
In its current incarnation, Stock Tweets is configured to display the day’s “top tweeted ticker”, as well as its closing price and percentage change, as per this tweet from Tuesday:
Top tweeted ticker today: USO 104.16 (-2.61%), 2 tweets from 2 users
Two users is hardly a crowd and the service is barely a week old, but Stock Tweets has already attracted considerable attention from (you guessed it) - the US financial blogosphere.
And as Kevin Frey, in response to an approving post on the subject by Howard Lindzon, noted:
I have had many, many conversations with a coworker of mine about the implications of having something aggregate stock talk on Twitter. The data to me is valuable and would be interesting to correlate against stock movements, or just to find interesting opportunities in the markets. I absolutely think this is an idea that will have legs.
Whether Stock Tweets will gain traction remains to be seen; what is clear is that financial information is getting exponentially easier to access and consequently, ever more difficult to regulate.
Perhaps day traders wanting to flog their strategies on Twitter should note the format of Fintag’s latest tweet - in case the regulators come a-calling:
time to borrow eur and buy usd assets. not that this is advice of course
Of course.
Related links:
Twitter in plain English - Common Craft Video
Alphaville on Twitter
Absolute Twit(ter)
