San Diego’s Stock Twits Aims its Social Media Tweets at the Wall Street People Who Matter

After more than 20 years of experience as a Wall Street investor and entrepreneur, Howard Lindzon has become a connoisseur of stock culture.

He says his disdain for CNBC was the reason he created WallStrip, an offbeat videoblog mix of finance, markets, and humor, in 2007. Eight months later, CBS acquired WallStrip for an undisclosed amount, which was reported by some sources as a $5 million deal.

Lindzon, who runs a small hedge fund called Lindzon Capital Partners, also has made a number of investments in a variety of Internet and new media startups, including Rent.com, Lifelock, Assistly, bitly, Klout, and TweetDeck. In 2008, Lindzon founded StockTwits, a new media startup in the San Diego area as a micro-blogging website that resembles a TweetDeck for traders. The concept enables investors to share their investing ideas, stock tips, comments, charts, and other information in 140-character tweets. In a statement today, StockTwits says it is setting a record for usage in the current earnings period—with a 200 percent increase in the number of tweets over the same earnings season last year.

Howard Lindzon

“If I’m running an institutional trade desk, and following real-time streaming of news, then Twitter is going to rule the world,” Lindzon says. “We’re taking the social Web, which is the greatest thing in the history of the Internet, and applying it to this one little vertical.”

With more than 100,000 registered users, StockTwits distributes its content through the usual social media suspects, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Francis Costello, StockTwits’ chief operating officer, says the company also has arranged to provide its real-time streaming comments to financial news sources like Yahoo Finance, CNN Money, Reuters, and Bloomberg as a way of monitoring “market sentiment.” Through its overall distribution network, StockTwits estimates that its content reaches a total of 50 million people.

In addition, Costello says StockTwits created the hashtag-like symbol for publicly traded stocks, $(ticker), which has been widely popularized and enables investors to aggregate

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.