Twitter certainly has gotten some great free press as of late, with Ashton Kutcher and Oprah all entering the fray.
All this excitement has not been lost on investors. Traders have been using a service called StockTwits to trade breaking news, ideas, commentary and data on the broader stock market and individual stocks. I like to use a Twitter client like TweetDeck to manage my Twitter experience. It even has a built-in interface to StockTwits so I can monitor chatter around my portfolio.
It’s great to see new investment products being rolled out for new platforms. If investors are consuming information via Twitter, so why not? So, while a group of early adopter investors are using Twitter to improve their trading, they now have a choice of 2 premium products to home their trading prowess.
Via an announcement today on the StockTwits blog, it was announced that StockTwits is marketing two subscription products produced by two outstanding memebers of the StockTwits community. Investors can pay $50/month or $500/year for access.
One of the products is produced by Upsidetrader, a blog written by Joe Donohue, who was a hedge fund founder after a 13 year stint as a retail broker at Kidder Peabody, Smith Barney, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
According to Upsidetrader, you get the following with your subscription:
- Weekly newsletter provides expert trading theses and pointed strategy for the coming week, as well as a detailed review of previous views; it is distributed during the weekend.
- In addition, Joe will post charts 2-3 nights during the trading week, providing clear, actionable set ups.
- Joe will educate you regarding his proprietary technical analysis system through the presentation of trades.
- You will have direct access to Joe through the StockTwits community platform.
StockTwits Business Model
Here’s something interesting. This new service is being delivered for a fee over Twitter and a 3rd party, namely, StockTwits is pocketing the profit. Twitter doesn’t see any of it.
I assume StockTwits does the marketing and billing, the two analysts write and manage the research, and there is a revenue share between the parties. Is this a new model, fee-based, Twitter-deliverd, investment research?
What do you think?
