Building One and Three Year Plans- Stocktwits Everywhere, Stocktwits AI and Idea Agents, Stocktwits Video, Stocktwits Investor Relations, Social Relative Strength and The Stocktwits Sentiment Index

Good morning…

I hope everyone had a peaceful 4th of July.

Ellen and I did very little. We are spending summer at our home in Coronado. The weather has been spectacular.

This morning I wanted to talk about a few long term strategies that are starting to pay off for Stocktwits and how we got there.

I started Stocktwits at the dawn of the ‘social era’ of investing back in 2008. I never thought about what the business or company or product would look like in 2025. The social, mobile era that kicked off in 2006, was a fun and lightweight, but overwhelming era of speed, technology, connectivity, money and unicorns. I just assumed that when we started Stocktwits in 2008 we would be swept up by another company along the way.

But, here we are in 2025 and the world of investing and technology look much different. Platforms are ‘closed’, network effects are rare and harder to come by, customer acquisition is expensive, interest rates are high, social is a dirty word and AI is the buzzword that venture money is chasing.

Stocktwits year 17 feels more like Stocktwits year 2 because everything we built before was table stakes to thrive in an era of AI.

Today, you are more on your own than ever building a business, even though starting a business has never been easier.

When I came back as Stocktwits CEO in March of 2024, I had a new vision of the world that Stocktwits lived/operated in. Obviously, AI would be a massive tailwind for us as we housed so much unique data, but I also believed we were in the middle of this boom in ‘the degenerate economy’ and Stocktwits needed to be at the center of it. While I had no illusion that we should be a broker (we quickly closed our broker/dealer) I did/do believe we have this unique and very active and liquid market of people talking, arguing, sharing ideas about stocks, crypto and markets. Tens of billions are being spent to win the ‘transaction’ which is a war we could never win. So, at Stocktwits we would double and triple down on our goal to be the place to go pre and post trade. One part of the content stack we were lacking was video and quickly over the last year we have built a video production team to help our favorite influencers and voices (new and old) grow their own audiences and voices. Today, we are doing hundreds of thousands of views a week, mostly live. The other big benefit of our Stocktwits production and video rollout was to enhance our fast growing Investor Relations business.

Next up, people will argue about thevalue of ‘community’ or marketplace, but I think it is priceless in an age of AI. I wanted to expand our community and marketplace of ideas and to do that we needed a much bigger funnel of people coming to Stocktwits.

To get this going I got our team focused on ‘Stocktwits Everywhere’ and it was based around our $ ‘cashtag’ API which is how we tag stocks and crypto and markets. We invented the cashtag back in 2008, and it is used around the web today for people to talk about stocks, especially on Stocktwits and Twitter.

I called my friend Ted Merz who had just left Bloomberg after 33 years and I asked him to help our team build a newsroom, which on paper sounds like a terrible idea. Our newsroom would be fast and lean and inexpensive to maintain. The unique spin would be writing news articles about stocks and markets that each contained our unique sentiment data about the tickers mentioned. These articles would be hand written, shared within the stocktwits community and plumbed across the ‘open’ internet.

Long story short, the newsroom has been a huge success and after one year our stories are in brokerages around the world and most recently Google News. I can tell you from firsthand experience that SEO is NOT dead and Google News is massive. Our news stories are receiving 20 times more clicks and impressions in just a few months.

We have also plumbed our Stocktwits API with Beehiiv so that financial newsletter writers can push their $ cashtag stories through Stocktwits (see below) and find new readers. We also partnered with Alpaca to have our news and sentiment available for all their brokerage customers around the world.

Another part of ‘Stocktwits Everywhere’ and a better/bigger/wider Stocktwits was a better crypto experience. A few months ago we launched ‘Cryptotwits’ and that has quickly grown in popularity.

Finally, with respect to AI, Stocktwits will have a few big announcements over the next few weeks, but we have already deployed AI across our trending tickers to help add context and launched the unique the ‘Stocktwits Sentiment Index’ on our home page.

By the 4th quarter, AI will help power and deploy greater context and speed inside all of Stocktwits so that users can make quick sense of sentiment, timelines, users profiles, and have their own Stocktwits ‘idea agents’ serve them up ideas that fit their risk profile and style.

Enough for today…

Have a great Sunday.