I have heard somewhere that nearly 15,000 analysts were laid off on Wall Street the last few years.
Wall Street is changing at many levels. The ‘guess’ a company’s quarter ‘to the penny’ game is no longer the game of choice offered by the few banks remaining.
To me it makes sense that this game would be picked up by the blogosphere and I am not too surprised that the blogosphere has already begun to trump analysts. No one is happier about this than Wall Street. If main street can go out and identify the 30-50 bloggers that can do it in a consistent way, the banks have crowdsourced the new talent.
The problem though remains….the penny calling game.
The real talent, the talent I would pay for though, is the investor/trader that can make me money from the news. That’s what the hedge funds will pay big money for and those people are on Stocktwits. I watched the stream in action dissect the news as a team on Monday and as a group buy the dip and make 10-30 points off the lows as the market opened Tuesday. I was watching, but did not buy. I did sell a little ‘publicly’ at $350 yesterday morning declaring I was one of the people a little nervous about Steve Jobs affect on the stock so seeing it back higher than the close before his health issue was as good a time as any to sell a little.
The best news of all is our streams will get smarter and deeper around events like this and learn to digest all the news beforehand as well. Don’t tell anybody :) .
agreed. i tweeted something similar about this yesterday. it was nice having a chance to talk to other investors about Jobs when the mkt was closed on MLK.
Stadium Status. StockTwits owns 2011.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear future reports/news that Wall Street firms will have repackaged blogger predictions/expectations as their own analysis. Bloomberg is helping to make this easier by incorporating public tweets into users Bloomberg profiles. Happened to me.
As to your point about the blogosphere vs analyst (re: earnings reports), I’d like to see the same type of thing with “bloggers vs pundits” vis a vis accuracy, relativity and mendacity.
Having said that and, as a loyal “Stocktwit,” I find that “following the Stocktwit streams” causes more of a “herd mentality” in many of my friends and associates. Essentially, it tends to alter their view, sometimes to the point of being afraid of “missing out” on something big or jumping out of a trade too early. In other words, it tends to accentuate fear and greed proclivities, not to mention biases.
For myself, I can’t be on Stocktwits during the trading day – with my daily (or ongoing) analysis in place and my trading rules strictly followed, I find it tends to distract me somewhat. But the input, freedom of information being put out there, and the lack of censorship is great, and I love it…just not between 6:30 am to 1 pm west coast time.
it s hopefully got something for everyone. i rarely trade so am the same
way though I love sharing my own thoughts so they are diarized.