Twitter Stock Community Stocktwits Gets Funding
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Stocktwits, which expands into twits writing about stock (a joke, guysrelax) on Twitter, has received an undisclosed amount from a panoply of NYC tech investor types. The first round was led by Roger Ehrenberg's IA Capital Partners (whose own company Monitor110 famously imploded earlier this year), and included a number of other investors: James Altucher: Founder, Stockpickr; Columnist at TheStreet.com; betaworks; Bill Bishop: Co-founder of Marketwatch; Alan Warms, former VP and GM of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) News and a few others. The beehive of investors reminds of the unfortunate situation with Daylife: too many investors too early; too many egos with too little at stake for each, but lets hope they have figured out a way to avoid it.
Stocktwits hopes the build on the immediacy and community functions of Twitter for a stock picking community. Here is how it describes itself: "Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data - using Twitter as the content production platform - and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc." I can see some potential for running into regulatory issues with such advice, though I am sure the company has thought of the pitfalls. The company has tied up with Bloomberg to create a filtered feed of Stocktwits commentary, that is supposed to be integrated in the terminal along with other non-traditional sources. For some more details, see this VB post.
By Rafat Ali