Last August, I was in Italy and the world was coming to an end…again. I had a feeling it would not, but I was extremely high on Pizza at the time.

Ivan, Phil and I had been fiddling with the idea of having a Social Web Index $SWEB to track the companies using and creating the tools of said web. Here it is. It was a rather boring list of names. Not nearly as exciting as the weekly Stocktwits 50 that we created as well. I sent to Fred Wilson and he said great idea, call me when the Companies are more exciting.

Today $YELP is public and your retirement account at Fidelity owns 40 shares. Wall Street still works it’s magic. I remember putting their widget back on my first blog in late 2005 (PutzorYutz.blogspot.com) and adding my favorite pizza places around Phoenix. I called Fred Wilson and said this is going to be huge. He agreed. That was the last time I used the product. I also cold called the founders in 2006 and pitched for the rights to open $YELP Canada (I believed Toronto would be a huge market). They said NO, we will handle it. So I started Wallstrip.

But I digress. While the market was plunging from my beautiful room in Milan a little over six months ago, we started the $SWEB  – StockTwits Social Web Index. The index would spotlight many major publicly traded companies building the foundation of the Social Web and/or leveraging it. Six months later, $QQQ is at 10 year high and the $SPY is at 3-year high.

In terms of performance, $SWEB has trailed the $SPY (Fred is right so far) but under the boring surface of indexing, there are some intriguing underlying trends.

The lessons from the losers:

After almost doubling in 2012, $NFLX is still down 50% since its level in August. A good lesson to always honor your stops.

Chinese social web companies – forget about them. They have no idea how to use “social” yet.

IPOs – tend to be terrible investments in the first 6-12 months of their existence, when there are way too many anxious sellers…from underpaid and overworked employees to venture capitalists who are totally satisfied with only 1000% returns on their investments.

It was ugly in August, but glorious today….remember these lists of leaders can be more interesting to look at in times of distress. Hopefully you come back ofetn to check in as we fiddle with the components to keep it fresh and on point.

Your suggestions are always welcome.