What could be worse than sending someone with a lot of experience to a profile page that calls out a member as a ‘Novice’. I believe that person becomes too easy to dismiss. Of course, if you are a beginner, you should feel comfortable declaring so as it might mean you are on our site to learn and improve your skills, but even Novices have experience and knowledge about certain areas of the market that they should be encouraged to share.

Furthermore, in our world, a good percentage of people will not share their real identities. Luckily, the timeline of ideas is your identity. I think the @ handles are very limiting in creativity and space. I believe traders and investors should have handles and nicknames with some style and pizzaz…For instance combining the name of the street you grew up on with your mother’s maiden name. Mine is Strathearn Brandwein.

In thinking through this problem I jotted a few new categories down that may increase engagement and community as we seek out trading and investing knowledge from the hundreds of thousands of profiles on Stocktwits.

PLEASE chime in on the comments to expand on these ideas…thanks:

Larry the Lurker – I just like watching from the sidelines. I appreciate all the ideas and flow and sharing and I promise to chime in every once in a while with a thank-you. Most of the web is Larry the Lurker. Ladies…if you lurk, you are now Lisa the Lurker!

Impatient optimist – You have confidence in your investments and trades but cant understand why they don’t move faster and steeper in your favor sooner. I am a bit cranky on the streams, but my heart is in the right place. Bill Gates is an impatient optimist.

Cranky Fundamentalist – You buy companies that nobody likes. You have your thesis and you don’t want to hear from others on why you just might be early or dare I say wrong.

Raging Bull – You like everything, all the time. There is always a trade and you will find it. You can’t take a day off but you don’t want to take a day off. You just want to beat the market into submission.

Dow Zero – It’s just a matter of time. I like Zero Hedge and being hit in the head. Before Stocktwits I used to get kicked off every financial platform for being mean. There is hope!

Eclectic Opportunist – You like bull markets, the trend is your friend, but with the right setup and the odds in your favor, you will trade anything. People matter just as much as price and volume. I am in search of smart people and big opportunities all the time.

Day Trader – I grind and poke and prod at trades all day but in the end my overriding goal besides profits is getting flat by the end of the day.

Who are you? Which type of investor am i missing…?

The post What Type of Financial Investor Are You? appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

Here is the F@#k Yeah from Tumblr founder David Karp.

From Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo)We promise not to screw it up!

Talk about two different stress levels!

On the armchair quarterback side of the web, there is outrage, snark (oh dear god the porn…the porn), jealousy and some backslapping. I of course added my own snark:

If I was Yahoo I would monetize the porn and kick off the damn bloggers and their low cpm’s #tumblr

— howardlindzon (@howardlindzon) May 19, 2013

Ever since $yhoo">$yhoo bought Tumblr my tumble blog just sucks.

— howardlindzon (@howardlindzon) May 19, 2013

On Wall Street, as usual, indifference from analysts. They have no models for this stuff. JP Morgan or some other TARP entity raised their price target on Yahoo to $27. Ballsy. The stock was up fractionally today which means that a huge deal like this was expected a while back and is priced in. The market is a leading indicator once again…and one billion dollars on Wall Street is a small rogue trade while a compliance officer is pissing.

The big loser in all this continues to be the middle class. They died in 2008. The bull market has moved on for 5 years without them. Honestly, no one really cares. The poor have their problems, the rich never liked them and the corporations have the globe to pillage.

Angel investing and web entrepreneurship will gain further momentum from this deal. As someone who has seen this stuff close up, it’s really possible in the era of the social and mobile web. The original Tumblr angel round was in 2007 at around $3 million. Assuming some dilution that’s a 200 times return on the original investment. A $50,000 angel investment is a cool $10 million. I would not even know how to have placed a stock market option bet for $50k in October 2008 that would have paid out 200 times my money. I can guarantee I would not have placed it and I surely would not have held that bet until today. That’s stuff Warren Buffett does with the money he takes from us for buying his insurance products they have no intention of paying us for with trades guaranteed by Goldman Sachs…

Building publishing platforms is a very sexy category. It is so important that entrepreneurs with vision think they can do it, that angel investors with guts and instinct are willing to invest and that venture capitalists fund and scale it. The platform side is a hard business though. You push off revenue for scale and it just pushes the stress out. Sales is never a sexy part of these companies. But, humans want to publish and share. We want to journal and chronicle. So the Tumblr deal is also a win for us creatives. Zach Verdin who started NewHive (we are investors at SocialLeverage) had this outside the box take on the deal that I agree with.

Time will tell how good an idea this really was for both sides. I love the boldness of it. Obviously Tumblr investors and shareholders are thrilled. They should be.

As for what Yahoo may do with Tumblr to surprise people, Ben Smith founder of Blayze (yes of course I am a biased investor) thinks Yahoo could do as Google did with YouTube and create a partner program. In the end…maybe the creators should/will be paid!

The artists might be the new middle class. Kabam.

The post Tumblrnomics – The Winners of the Tumblr and Yahoo Deal are …..Web Entrepreneurs, Creatives and Angel Investing…The Loser is The Middle Class appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

Obviously I am a huge fan of Josh because of his style of thinking. In 2010-2012, thousands of Stocktwits peeps were uber bullish as we saw breakout after breakout in software, technology, biotech and other industries. I believe many thousands of us on Stocktwits have ridden this bull together. In February 2012, Josh had this great post up titled ‘Get your Shit Together‘. Turns out you were not chasing the market even than. You were early.

When I sat with Brad Feld a month or so ago, we chatted about the state of the markets and I mentioned to him that the market felt late innings. He disagreed and said middle innings and I ended up agreeing with him and blogged about it. A month later feels like a year of gains yet again. The market has rocketed.

I am loving it of course, but the hair on my neck is rising. Every idea I have is working. Not just a little bit either. Old white men that own ‘TARP’ bank stocks are giddy. The financials, which were almost washed away in 2008, are breaking out with authority.

It’s so good right now that the island of Coronado approved the Lindzon’s to build a full bathroom in our garage. Turns out our original garage, which is very old, was built by someone with two long Cadillacs or horse carriages and parked them in front of each other. Thats means our garage is longer than any modern garage and has the length that predates the current zoning limitations. WE WIN! More square footage out of thin air in Coronado is a mini Powerball.

A certain neighbor (still triangulating the meanie who Max plans on torturing with loud teen music until college), let’s call him ZeroHedge for the sake of this blog post, turned us in to the city as we began construction. You do not mess with a woman and her home (note to neighbors). Turns out that rolling on us actually helped bring us the even better news from the city. It feels like my neighborhood enemies are short Tesla, Netflix and Priceline.

But I have digressed.

Let’s take a harder look at where we are because of that neck hair thing I mentioned earlier. Ari Wald, a great reader of the tape posted this a few days ago. It captures the chase pretty well:

In hindsight this tape was easy of course. I am winning, you are winning, but it’s a raging bull market.

I have sold things way to early, and I am way underinvested again in stocks. I will continue to pare down stocks like $GOOG that have run like hell and make mistakes like I did selling $TSLA in the 50′s and 60′s on the run to now $90. I will keep adding a few fresh breakouts like $EFII, $YELP $MELI and $MENT as I have outlined the last few weeks on the streams and share ones I am eyeballing. Here is this week’s Stocktwits 50 for you .

Last year I liked stocks a lot as Y Combinator start-up investing rounds hit $10 million valuations. Interestingly, there has been no start-up crash, just a ton more interesting ideas at really fair pricing, so back we dive in with our check book. One year later Tom, Chris and I (SocialLeverage) are investing rapidly in startups at $2-$4 million valuations once again. It is stocks now that look to be in silly mode.

This is just one of those rare moments where the opportunities are rich and thick even as chasing exists. My hunch continues to be the leverage from the social and people web is working it’s magic with the intoxicating mix of global money printing.

Of course it will end, but you should be focused on enjoying this investing moment in time. You earned it.

The post Everyone in the Chase Pool…Remember This Moment appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

Wow. Mazel Tov to the investors.

Not that you are counting, but I am…that makes three $1 billion companies in 2007 and 2008 I passed on as an angel…$ZNGA, Twitter and now Tumblr. Actually I asked David after this interview if I could invest $50,000 in his angel round and he quickly said no:

I just ran into David by chance in San Francisco and we had a nice chat. I assumed he was there for the Google IO conference. I should have just asked him for a loan.

My quick thoughts because I have been asked are that this is a great deal for $YHOO and obviously a fantastic deal for Tumblr. Yahoo gets UGC (User Generated Content) up the ying yang from this acquisition and an easy to use platform that teens freaking love. It is also the one UGC Company that does not break the bank for Yahoo. Tumblr gets the inflated cash price for being the right product at the right place at the right time.

Another huge winner is Frank Quattrone. Like all great American bankers, he has been prosecuted but never convicted.

Maybe not a coincidence that Tumblr is said to have a lot of porn on their site and Quattrone has a ‘porn’ moustache…

The post $1 Billion is Not Cool….$1.1 Billion is…and The Moustache is Back appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

One of the most used words outside of actual tickers the last 3 years on Stocktwits is ‘Overvalued’.

It somehow makes investors and traders feel good about their positions or lack thereof as the markets romp in the United States.

I cringe when I hear it used when talking stocks. LIQUID securities that you can fling around for a few shekels commission amongst the lunatic and behemoth institutions of 2013 are the furthest thing from ‘overvalued’ or ‘undervalued’.

According to gentlemen like Mark Cuban,’the market is broken’ or the whole thing is now ‘just a game’. It is just not true.

Today, Salesforce is hitting all time highs. It is hard to find non-employees that will admit to owning the stock. It is of course ‘overvalued’.

The Company should just change their ticker symbol to $OVRVLD from $CRM for kicks.

I have quickly annotated a Salesforce chart for you since 2009:

There are so many forces at work in the markets at any moment. Don’t be lazy with any one style or indicator.

The post Overvalued, Overvalued, Overvalued…NOT the Location, Location Location of Markets appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

My friend Brian Lund is a co-founder at DittoTrade and someone who loves stocks and markets and sharing on the subjects as much as me. He and I will help as many of you that want get started as lead investors or as followers. I am starting out with $50,000 from my hedge fund with 5 lead traders this month and will obviously be following up here and on the streams over the months ahead.

More formally on the deal from Phil Pearlman and how we did this first integration:

Keith Kern’s (@stt2318) profile identifying him as a Lead Trader on Ditto Trade

This morning, StockTwits is pleased to announce an agreement with Ditto Trade that allows our members, who offer their trading or alerts services through Ditto Trade, to display a Premium Ditto Trade Profile.

The new premium profile lets StockTwits members know who offers the Ditto Trade service and to sign up for the real-time trades or alerts services directly from StockTwits.

Paul M. Simons, CEO of Ditto Trade had this to say about the agreement,

Our agreement with StockTwits is consistent with our vision to provide individual investors unprecedented access to actionable ideas from experienced traders and investors and the ability to efficiently act on them in real time.

The Ditto Trade agreement is great for StockTwits members because it allows them to find and follow investors and traders who put ideas out on the StockTwits stream everyday and to observe their trading styles as they choose to subscribe to Ditto Trade Lead Traders.

It also allows select StockTwits members to monetize their social capital!

If you are interested in promoting your Ditto Trade service on your StockTwits Profile, click HERE.

Thus far, 5 Ditto Trade Lead Traders have the Premium Ditto Trade Profiles, including:

Keith Kern

Marc Mandel

Steve Gomez

Charles Sizemore

Ryan Mallory

If you are interested in subscribing to one of the above’s Ditto Trade services, check them out on the stream!

The post Stocktwits Welcomes Premium Ditto Trade Profiles…Deeper and Lighter Social Investing appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

On one end of the trend…Union Square has a good track record of investing in things that are too early to understand for most, but become mainstream. They invest many millions of dollars in platforms and ideas that have traction, but many hurdles on their way to mainstream.

On the other end of the trend is Warren Buffeet. Warren can be late. He can buy troubled companies or great companies late in their growth cycle like $IBM. At the same time that Fred Wilson is confirming ‘game on’ with the Bitcoin trend and all that Bitcoin means (trust, currency, security, technology), Warren can ignore and hoard railroads and banks. As a recent example, I am sure Warren had never heard of Twitter in 2007, scoffed at in in 2010, and signed up for Twitter last week. For those calling a top on Twitter because of Warren Buffett, prepared to be wrong. The trend is just now maturing.

In yesterday’s WSJ, Warren was quoted on Bitcoin:

Still, the budding currency is far off from going mainstream. Investor Warren Buffett professed Saturday to knowing nothing about Bitcoin when asked about it during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting.

“I’ll put it this way, of our $49 billion we haven’t moved any of it to Bitcoin,” he said.

Fred is taking a lot of risk. That’s his job. But, as a risk taker myself, I like to see this type of setup. Not too early for Fred, but way too early for Warren Buffett.

That’s meat.

Game on.

The post Meaty Trends – Trust, Security and Bitcoins appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

But I digress. This post is about more than Tesla the stock or the company.

I am tired of all the old ways of profiling people financially. It’s boring…

I fill out new account Statements probably once a quarter it seems for various brokerages or banks and the questions are all the same.

I am not a ‘Novice’ or a ‘Pro’. I am not ‘Intermediate’. God forbid I am labeled forever as a ‘Daytrader’. I am not a ‘momentum’ investor though I have learned to live with the label. I LOVE risk, but not crazy risk. I am an opportunity guy. If the pattern fits and I understand the catalysts and liquidity and price, I will invest or trade it. I prefer to make investments because of my time away from the desk, but if an investment becomes a trade…so be it.

I am an ‘Eclectic Opportunist’ and that fits way better than a ‘Trend Follower’ or ‘Momentum Investor’.

I think my recent Tesla trade/investment is a perfect example of my style. I started thinking really hard about it as it probed highs in February. I covered it in detail here.

I doubt I will ever own a Tesla, but it’s possible. We are a one car family the last 4 years. I thought it was an impossible financial undertaking and was skeptical at their IPO. The IPO was a huge success for all involved including the people that bought opening day shares. As time passed the last year, the stock has based between $30 and $40.

Early adopters were raving about their Tesla’s. The shortsellers are neck high in the stock and leaning in to it as the financials made less and less sense to them.

As I saw the stock stay firm and break to new highs in the high 30′s I bought some shares and noted so on Stocktwits. There is a lot of other stuff I factor in, like the market itself and being in a buy mode in general for stocks as I journal on the blog here, but that’s the gist for the sake of this post. Here is a full chart of the last year from Chartiq (an insanely good product I now use from my desktop though it is a mobile first charting company):

CLICK HERE FOR THE CHART WITH ANNOTATIONS

I have marked my buys on the chart and my other annotations as the stock rose and I mentioned what I was doing on Stocktwits including the final sale this morning. Tesla could be on it’s way to $500 and $50 billion in valuation but I am treating it as I do almost all stocks…as an ‘eclectic opportunist’. It’s not a system as much as a pattern that I have learned to recognize. I will never be early and hope never to be the last guy in the room. I believe there will be a thousand more Tesla’s in my investing life and prefer focusing on these type of opportunities that the stock market brings.

This crazy good bull market has covered up a lot of investment mistakes but next time up I will walk through a loser of mine.

I am really excited to continue to grow and learn with others on the Stocktwits stream, including the founders of ChartIq (who use the Stocktwits API), while we push the boundaries of mentoring and market education.

The post The ‘Eclectic Opportunist’…and My Tesla Investment/Trade appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

My favorite market conversations come with technology people (geeks) who don’t think they know anything about the markets.

Take a look at this simple chart shared by Jason Calacanis yesterday about the Nasdaq and 20 years of the internet…

The internet is gathering momentum in year 20 with the global, mobile web.

Baidu (Chinese search Giant) just paid $375 million to compete in web video and in India, web video consumption just doubled. Netflix was dead last year and now after one of the greatest pivots/refreshes of all time, back on top. Let’s be honest, Google or Apple could be a trillion dollar company, Apple will do $200 BILLION in sales this year.

Last week I was invited on the Jason Calcanis news podcast called ‘This Week In‘. Here is the full episode (no need to watch, but a great listen if you have the time):

The geeks are as granular around their new products like Google Glass as we on Stocktwits are about trending tickers by the minute.

At the end of the discussion I start explaining to Jason and EnGadget that they are thinking too small with respect to their writing. They are slapping Blackberry ads against content that Wall Street might pay millions for. Nobody on Wall Street got me interested in Tesla…in fact Wall Street is short Tesla. Jason, the early adopter and lover of all things Tesla has been raving to his large audience of early adopters about the product for a year. When I combined the product buzz with the price and volume buzz I got long the stock on my own and the signal produced a huge gain.

The internet has of course broken down old industries and exploded new ones onto the scene. My gut is the next 10 years will see more of the same but also more of a melding of everything and unique new business models both niche and scalable.

One look at Jason’s simple chart above makes me feel that another spike is out there, especially in the loose global monetary world we live in today.

The post What If The Markets are UnderValued… appeared first on Howard Lindzon.

Today the S&P is above 1,600 and an all-time high. $GOOG is hitting all time highs (long). So are the RAILROADS.

If the boom ended tomorrow, I hope I would see the writing on the walls and not average down into hell.

Luckily, this boom is relentless and accelerating.

In 2008, the markets changed. The world was ending, but a new layer of communication was being cobbled together by regular people not focused on the stock market or any markets. They were talking about lunch and getting together. A language was also being developed. It’s a relatively easy language and it’s global. Our kids speak that language and we are all connected like never before. IT is impossible to measure the productivity and growth of people and businesses flowing with social connectivity.

Just a month or so ago I gave an interview to our fantatstic Stocktwits sponsors at CME Group. I ended with this:

Making predictions is difficult, but we’ll put you on the spot and ask you to give us your views on the future of social media and the markets – what should people interested in the markets being think about in the coming year or two from social?

Social media is a tool and it is your choice to use it or not. For some people it will be poison, for others it will be a panacea. It all depends on how you decide to use it and how much time are you willing to devote to learn how to use it properly. You could use it for gossiping, finger pointing ego and bullying, and you will lose in the process of doing so or you could be smarter and use it to accelerate your learning curve and get great ideas from other passionate traders and investors and build a competitive advantage by sharing.The social trend is relentless and accelerating. I think the term social media will fade as media is not a meaningful word for the phenomenon. I call it the social web and the power of social leverage. The financial leverage was our last boom and bust, the social leverage boom is more interesting because it touches more people and industries. Going fast is addictive. The social web allows us to speed up. Finance and markets are no different. While social and finance have lagged, when it finally gathers the right momentum, it will speed past the other areas of the social web because of the profit potential.

Yesterday as my pal Josh so eloquently captures the event, Warren Buffett signed up for Twitter. I doubt he talks much about markets…at first. The markets are in his blood though and he will need to do it. He may just link to his thoughts, but now Warren has a broadcast platform to get shit off his chest whenever he feels like it. He can block the lunatics as well.

I can’t figure out if Twitter is worth $10 billion today because Warren Buffett is on Twitter or Warren Buffitt is on Twitter:

Google is a sell.Fuck Search.Bring me coal.

— WarrenBuffitt (@WarrenBuffitt) May 2, 2013

I think it does mean you need to put in the work and follow the right people with the right ideas and that has never been easier.

The post The Greatest Boom of All Time…and @Warren Buffett or @Warren Buffitt appeared first on Howard Lindzon.