Twitter and Trading: The Race to Find A Way Continues

October 8, 2013 Leave a comment

Oct 7, 2013

Twitter and Trading: The Race to Find A Way Continues

By Geoffrey Rogow

While investors will be clamoring to get a share Twitter Inc., a host of financial firms that see untapped trading potential in the social media site are looking to cash in. The latest financial firm is Eagle Alpha, a London based technology group that on Monday launched Social Sonar — a subscription service that synthesizes Twitter down into only market essential information. That information is then delivered directly to traders, who can use the information as part of a broader computer-generated trading program or use the feed for unique insight.With companies and executives are using Twitter increasingly, firms like Eagle Alpha are betting that traders will increasingly need that information in a fast, read-only format. They fit among the increasing mass of“social listening firms” that have formed an ecosystem around Twitter.

For traders, however, one big concern remains: fake tweets, such as the April hoax that saw a verified Associated Press account warn of explosions at the White House.

“We knew the AP tweet was fake because if the Syrian Electronic Army had written it properly it would have followed the AP style guide. For example, ‘breaking’ should have been in upper case, ‘Barack’ should have had the word ‘President’ before it,” said Emmett Kilduff, Eagle Alpha founder and chief executive.

To be sure, Eagle isn’t the first, nor it will be the last firm looking at new ways to use Twitter in trading.

Among the other firms, DCM Dealer in January launched a new real-time trading product that gives sentiment scores based on social media platforms, such as Twitter. DCM Dealer put itself up for sale less than two months later.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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