Social Data Boom – More Important Than You Think for Markets, Trading and Investing

One of our partners, GNIP, has an awesome whitepaper on ‘Social Media and Markets: The Coming of Age’. It is well worth a download and read.

I have been relying on social data very heavily since 2005. It is the year I started blogging, and here is the proof. It is amazing how many of those bloggers, investors and sites I followed back in 2005 (check that blogroll on the right side) continue to be my faves today. The biggest difference about blogging in 2005 versus today is the messiness of the platforms and the pages which I miss today and will likely return (that is a subject for another post).

In that time I have made over 100 angel investments, traded through a few crashes, invested through a boom, created Wallstrip and co-founded Stocktwits.

In the beginning of the ‘social data’ boom, I would look at videos on $CROX over at YouTube to try and get a feel for the product catalysts which I was very bullish on in 2006. One of our early Wallstrip’s explains how simple, but I felt interesting and relevant the data could be:

Today, the demand for social data in financial markets is increasing quickly. With the proliferation of API’s and distribution platforms including Stocktwits, the data is easier to ingest and analyze all over Wall Street. On Stocktwits, ‘cashtagging’ ($ticker) is up more than 300 percent in the last few years. I have long called Stocktwits streams ‘The Human Ticker’. I have spent the last 5 years helping build it, learning how to read it and trying to explain why it is important. It is good to see more people listening and appreciating the platform and it’s exhaust.

GNIP added this great graphic that explains how everyone else wants to do the same (click on it to enlarge):

Reuters, a customer of Stocktwits, had this to say in their Annual Report:

Almost 90 percent of Stocktwits ‘cashtagged’ messages that originate on our platform, stay only on our platform, not shared to Twitter, so we expect to see more customers like Reuters recognize our unique data set in 2014 and beyond.