Day Traders…Wired and 'Tired'.

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  • on March 27th, 2010

I was emailed recently by David Segal of The New York Times because he stumbled upon Stocktwits.com in his research for today’s New York Times piece on Day Traders 2.0 – ‘Wired, Angry and Loving it . David got the wired part correct.

In the spirit of ‘all press is good press’, we spoke a few times at length about trading, the markets, Stocktwits.com and David asked for some intros to traders that use our product.

If you talk to me as long as David did, you will get some good soundbites. On my end, I am never sure about the context so I am always crossing my fingers. Here is one of the quotes he chose:

“There’s this idea out there that retail investors are dumb,” says Howard Lindzon, the co-founder of StockTwits, which curates a gusher of stock tips and financial news alerts tweeted by 20,000 regular contributors. “Well, it turns out that the institutional investors are pretty dumb. They nearly blew us all up with leverage.”

If my name was Charles Schwab, I too would NOT have contributed to an article with David’s headline. Day trading is a myth. It is also a ‘tired’ term…like journalist…like newspaper.

My friend Steve Gomez is profiled in the article as was his business and maybe I am not a good friend for sending The Times his way for this story. The one thing I do know about Steve and the friends that I do have that trade, is they keep moving forward and they adapt. They try everything. I know we all dread the word ‘Day Traders’. I am sure Schwab dreads the term and for whatever money Schwab makes off traders it plows into better services. They could not afford the ‘Talk to Chuck’ campaign if they too had not evolved beyond day traders.

At Stocktwits, we are about connecting people. We are an ‘idea engine’. We are about discovery, sharing and speed. We are also about filtering and curation. If we do all of these things well, we will be about profits.

The New York Times is about profits as well so an article with a title about day traders will bring about some juicy Google Ads about skyrocketing penny stocks and 3,000 percent returns.

Anyways…

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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