Tapping into Twitter to feel the market

Image via CrunchBase

According to Chris Bennett at 97thfloor, Twitter may be the next big thing after Google. With reasons: Twitter takes the concept of short text status updates as seen on MSN Messenger, Facebook and others and expands the idea to make a global party line of endless chatter. How is that useful you ask? Twitter uses symbols to help categorize the content. For example, the hash symbol (#) is added in front of keywords to tag your subjects. You can also direct messages to specific users with the @ sign followed by their username. All this information can be accessed and searched on the Twitter search engine and many 3rd party search engines.

Then comes StockTwits, a Twitter aggregator that uses the $ sign in front of stock ticker symbols to filter tweets on a specific company. Using this site, you can read real-time tweets about what’s happening and what other traders have to say about what you are trading. At the moment, the top tickers at StockTwits are FAZ and FAS, the Direxion Financial 3X ETFs. These channels are very active and can help you find trade ideas.