StockTwits is a social media platform designed for sharing ideas between investors, traders, and entrepreneurs. The company was co-founded by Howard Lindzon and Soren Macbeth in 2009. The company received the first annual Shorty Award in the 2008 finance category. Time magazine listed the company as one of their 2010 "50 best websites". The company was also named one of the "top 10 most innovative companies in finance" in 2012 by FastCompany. In June 2013, StockTwits had 230,000 active members. By mid-2019, that figure had increased to two million, and the company premiered free online trading via an iOS app.
History
The idea for the company came from a 2008 blog post where Lindzon suggested that Twitter would be great for stocks and markets even though he once passed on the opportunity to invest in the company. Lindzon teamed up with Soren Macbeth to form the company in 2009. The company utilized Twitter's application programming interface to integrate StockTwits as its own "highly graphical platform of market news, sentiment and stock-picking tools." StockTwits utilized "cashtags" with the stock ticker symbol, similar to the Twitter hashtag, as a way of indexing people's thoughts and ideas about a company and the stock. StockTwits received the first annual Shorty Award in the 2008 finance category. Incorporation of the company Abnormal Returns in 2010 has boosted the content available to StockTwits subscribers. StockTwits began offering a service in 2011 that allows companies to manage and monitor information within the service. Lindzon says it also allows a company to "monitor discussion about the company". Time magazine listed StockTwits as one of their 2010 "50 best websites". StockTwits was named one of the "top 10 most innovative companies in finance" in 2012 by FastCompany. As of June 2013, StockTwits has raised $8.6 million in venture capital but has not yet made a profit. Fifty percent of the company's revenue comes from financial data sold to clients including Bloomberg L.P. and Google. Lindzon believes a "cultural change" is needed for the large financial institutions to embrace this technology and that change may take as long as five years. In June 2016, StockTwits, Inc. announced that Ian Rosen, a co-founder of Even Financial and former general manager at MarketWatch as Chief Executive Officer. In January 2017, StockTwits Inc acquired Investing Discovery Platform SparkFin, Inc.
Use
As of 2013, StockTwits currently has over 230,000 active members. Lindzon encourages new traders to spend time on StockTwits learning the language. He says that "You don’t learn Spanish in one day, and you’re not going to learn how to invest in stocks in one day. Treat it like a language." Lindzon coauthored the book The StockTwits Edge: 40 Actionable Trade Set-Ups from Real Market Pros with Philip Pearlman and Ivaylo Ivanoff to assist new users with getting the most out of the service. StockTwits allows users to communicate to Ticker Streams in real time with the use of cashtags. Users are also able to communicate directly using the "@" symbol before a username, a feature seen on Twitter. Content featured on StockTwits can also be shared to the StockTwits extended network which includes sites such as Yahoo Finance and CNN Money. Users also have the ability to share content to their personal Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. As of 2012 StockTwits has an open API allowing other sites such as TradingView, LikeAssets and HootSuite to integrate their users with StockTwits.
Controversy
Twitter incorporated the cashtags into their platform in 2012 effectively "hijacking" the StockTwits idea. In response to this announcement, Lindzon blogged that "It's interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation of $TICKER i.e. $AAPL". He went on to note that "You can hijack a plane but it does not mean you know how to fly it." Lindzon sold all of his Twitter stock in 2012 as a result of this controversy.
