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

comments around a particular stock, such as $AAPL or $GOOG.

With the increasing acceptance of the stock ticker tag, StockTwits also has identified its core business and revenue source—the investor relations and public relations units of publicly traded companies. Such companies as Dell, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and PepsiCo have signed up for a higher level of service (for a monthly subscription fee) that enables each company to “claim” its stock ticker, and to use the tag to distribute corporate information over the Web.

StockTwits is planning additional investor relations services specifically for regulated members of the investment industry, which will enable them to use StockTwits’ social media platform to reach investors in compliance with market regulations

Francis Costello

At the same time, Lindzon and Costello say StockTwits has strived to separate itself from online crazies by rejecting bulletin-board stocks, where much of the pump-and-dump rabble is focused, and by curating the content through a combination of rules and online monitors. “We do rule with an iron fist, so you can’t talk about penny stocks,” Lindzon says. StockTwits also enables users to follow each other—like Twitter—which is another way of building an audience around key market influencers.

“I truly believe in the wisdom of the crowd—I just like to choose my own crowd,” Lindzon says. “The reason I built StockTwits was because I follow certain stocks, and I follow these 40 people who are following these stocks, and so I wanted to mash them up.”

Lindzon says he provided initial funding for the company, which now has 23 employees in a non-descript building in Coronado, CA. Over the past three years, Stock Twits has raised $8.6 million through a Series A round led True Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, and a Series B led by the Foundry Group of Boulder, CO.

In an aside, Lindzon says he founded StockTwits in the San Diego area because he preferred it to Silicon Valley, and frequently came here on vacation from Arizona, where he was previously living. He also says he wasn’t concerned about the scarcity of local venture capital in San Diego, and is now seeing an increase in local tech startup activity. “I’m very bullish on San Diego as a Web capital; I’ve invested in three companies here,” Lindzon says.

In a parting shot, he adds, “Part of the charm is that we’re about as far as possible from New Jersey, which is where CNBC is based.”

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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.