Mister Twitter

Attention Stock holders and traders, Stocktwits may change the outlook on how you trade. A new financial micro-blogging site lets newbies learn from the pros gets advice at no charge for the time being.

A newbie can ask advice to an advanced stock trader in real time via Stocktwits. And stock traders can get investors through Stocktwits. It's a social networking site with stock exchange as their main topic.

Stocktwits is a month old site and was launched in October by Internet entrepreneurs Howard Lindzon and Soren Macbeth, StockTwits uses the same technology that runs microblogging pioneer Twitter. Lindzon notice that people were already talking about stocks on Twitter. So Macbeth came up with a way to tag stock-related Twitter messages known as Tweets and aggregate them. The two entrepreneurs created a filter to separate the chitchat and zero in on finance and trading through a simple platform that was global, lightweight, stable, and in real time.

StockTwits has become a marketplace for ideas that lets amateurs mix it up with former hedge fund managers and traders. The good thing about StockTwits is it doesn't require registration or e-mail verification and users don't need to create a portfolio of stocks to find potential matches or browse through professional portfolios for trading ideas.

Instead, with just a Twitter username and password, users are immersed in a virtual trading floor. It is like the modern version of traders shouting in the pits. Stocktwits is more efficient than chat rooms; there's no need to search through a labyrinth of stock forums that end up yielding poor and outdated information.

Having a constant stream of ideas flowing across a Stocktwits screen might seem distracting to some. But in other people's case it has saved a lot of money because it has held them back from bad trades. It's a useful tool in assessing risk.

As of today, StockTwits has more than 10,000 subscribers who spend an average of 15 minutes on the site and contribute 3,000 unique tweets per day. While these figures may seem small, StockTwits is a niche community and like Twitter or any other microblogging platform should not be subject to the same type of analytics used to measure traditional sites and blogs. Updates are made 140 characters at a time—like a short text message or instant message—and visits are brief and scattered throughout the day.

For communities like StockTwits, the key is knowing who follows whom, who posts the most and to whom. It's a new level of transparency or accountability everyone is holding themselves to.

Give you a tip. Follow a trader that you think will make it big in the future. If you think Oracle will hit big time then go ahead and follow them. And if sometime you think that Oracle is not performing well then unfollow them. That's the beauty of StockTwits.

So how will Stocktwits make a profit? Finance news is important and valuable to stock traders. They are willing to spend money to get that kind of information. Stocktwits aims to give premium content for a fee. For example, the site may charge users to learn more about why a user is trading against a particular bank, or for educational tools based on a person's investing preference.

StockTwits goal is to help newbies get the fast track of being a successful stock trader. Newbies have an advantage to learn details of trading that they never even knew it existed.