The Post Real-Time World...How Investors and Traders Should Be Thinking About This Era

I have been spending a lot of time the last few months organizing my thoughts through notes and doodles to come up with a way to describe certain trends in information and data that are unfolding.

I have been investing since the 1990’s when my stock market information was served up to me in Yahoo Finance on a 20 minute delay. For whatever dumb reason, I thought that was nirvana. I was the sucker in the room as was anyone if they thought they had ‘an edge’.

In 2007, when Twitter clicked for me, I absolutely knew I had an edge because of the way I thought about markets and the leapfrog being made from 20 minute delayed quotes and information to real-time. Lucky for me, my past experience and interests were perfectly aligned for the edge that real-time Twitter and information unlocked. I plunged all in with my time and money on this ‘real time’ ecosystem and era and the results (from an investing perspective) have been excellent.

Unfortunately for most of us now that loved Twitter and this era, the gymormous venture fund raises and the business model that came with it - advertising - destroyed the beauty of this moment and now the ‘algorithms’ have further butchered the hope of a real-time information economy.

Long story short, we now live in a ‘post real-time’ world.

There is no real time for all, there is just a clusterf**k of fake and real news and opinion and misdirection shared in real time that makes real time too noisy for most. The cheaters/grifters control real-time with another small group that can pay enough to see it and manage it.

In this ‘post real time world’ of investing and information I believe there is a richer signal and one with more alpha and less noise in places like Stocktwits. One where you are a minute or two behind real-time (although we offer a real-time feed for every stock, token and market) with a large enough community or audience to filter the many platforms that claim to be real time. With AI bringing down the costs of managing, organizing and retrieving datasets, this post real-time world will create so many more great investors and traders from all corners of the earth. Look for even faster onboarding of new investors as people realize the opportunity. How do I know?

See Robinhood ( $HOOD ( ▼ 2.73% ) and $COIN ( ▲ 1.07% ) , Alpaca, $ETOR ( ▼ 3.27% ) ) etc…

Of course, this does not change the fact that for most, low cost indexing (standing well away from the flow of information), works just great.

More to come on this subject in the coming weeks.