AlacraBlog

Twitter is the Herd, or, Trading with Twitter

There have been a handful of articles this week talking about using Twitter for algorithmic trading.  StockTwits has been successful in aggregating over 80,000 stock traders who want to share stock trading ideas.  Tweets which have a ticker symbol preceded by a $ sign ($AAPL, for example) go into the StockTwits stream for users to interpret as they like.  For algo trading, the entire Twitter stream might be used as a source of news that might affect a market (report of an earthquake) or to decipher sentiment about a major new product release - the herd is Twitter. 
There are a number of challenges with this; all of which will likely be overcome, but still its hard to imagine consistently extracting alpha from the Twitter stream right now.  First problem is that service is just not that reliable, and you're not sure whether or not it's gone down unless it's just stops.  Low-latency Twitter is some time away.  Second, although the messages are only 140 characters long there are plenty of them and more than 99% of them at any moment will be noise.  Lastly, as a source of real-time news Twitter has already proven itself but as a source of real-time sentiment I'm not certain there's any proof.  But as I said upfront, these challenges will likely be overcome - 10 years ago Bloomberg and many others scoffed at the internet as a channel over which to deliver market data.

From Wall Street & Technology: Algo Traders Connect to Twitter

From the Telegraph: Hedge Fund Managers Betting Twitter Will Give Them An Edge In Rapid Trading

From the StreamBase Event Processing Blog: Trading on Twitter: Opportunity, Danger, or Folly?

SLA 2009 Wrap-Up

I just returned from the Centennial Special Libraries Association (SLA) Conference which was held in Washington DC.  The two highlights on opening night were seeing  awards given to Alacra friends Anne Mintz and Pam Rollo of BST.  Anne is the author of Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet. 

The awards were immediately followed by Clare Hart introducing Colin Powell who gave a terrific keynote.  Powell spoke for almost any hour, without notes, on a wide range of topics.  Powell was responsible for buying millions of dollars of computers for the State Department (replacing their Wangs) and when he couldn't get his State Department team to move fast enough, he said "We need to update in real-time.  I want to beat the CIA."  It was a great talk.

While the conference organizers reported that attendance was higher than last year's event in Seattle, it seemed as if this year's numbers were high due to the large number of daytrippers and DC locals.  The exhibit hall wasn't very crowded and vendors had cut back dramatically on give-aways.  Many attendees complained there was little candy being offered and no one was handing out bottled water or t-shirts.  The vendors had their game faces on but it seemed to me that the information services market remains in recession.  "There's no new spending."

At the Alacra stand we did get any excellent response to our Pulse line of products and our recently released Pulse Professional.  I did the annual Business and Finance division vendor speed-dating and focused on the Pulse Platform.  The other vendors presenting were Dow Jones, Lexis-Nexis and BNA.

Walking among the other booths I noticed an increased focus on real-time and near-real-time information.  I have long believed  that eventually all business information will need to be delivered in near-real-time and we seem to be at any inflection point right now.

Often times when traveling it's all about the food.  As is our custom,  Alacra sponsored the annual business and finance division luncheon where the food wasn't that great.  But we found three other truly excellent restaurants in Washington that I would highly recommend.   The annual Alacra client dinner was held in a Georgetown restaurant called Neyla.  The evening was beautifully orchestrated by Carol Ann Thomas and Fran Falchook. I was seated at the European Business Information Conference (EBIC) reunion table.  For those of you who have been to EBIC my tablemates were leaders of the well-known "bad bus".  Needless to say this table was a little  louder than the rest.

Two other great restaurants we found were Founding Farmers and The Blue Duck Tavern.  SLA is planned to be in New Orleans next year. 

See Alacra at SLA 09 Album below on right for more pics!

Introducing Alacra Pulse Professional

A few months ago, we launched the Alacra Pulse platform and its first application, Street Pulse. The free version of Street Pulse is available at http://pulse.alacra.com.

Today, we've announced the release of Alacra Pulse Professional, the premium version of that platform.

Alacra Pulse finds, filters and packages web-based content so that you can quickly consume relevant, important information about a company.  The Pulse Platform reads and analyzes news stories and blog posts from more than 2,900 hand-selected mainstream and alternative media (noteworth blogs) RSS feeds searching for specific types of business information

While the free site is useful for ad-hoc lookups, Alacra Pulse Professional has been developed with a focus on the professional user. Alacra Pulse Professional provides business and financial professionals with added functionality, specifically:

• The ability to create portfolios or watch lists in order to easily monitor key events on the companies they follow;
• Daily email alerts of the latest events on companies in portfolios, delivered to their inbox or mobile device; and
• Information sharing, to easily share relevant articles with peers, colleagues or clients

We're demonstrating Alacra Pulse Professional this week at the Special Libraries Association annual conference. If you're at SLA, drop by and take a look.

SLA 2009, Washington, DC

A bunch of people have recently asked me “have you given up on blogging?”  I answer no, but recently I’ve had neither the time nor anything important to say that I couldn’t say in 140 characters.  So I’ve been tweeting a bit instead.  I'm @alacra1 on Twitter.

But one important thing is that Alacra will be exhibiting at the annual Special Libraries Association Conference in Washington DC starting on Sunday.  If you plan to be at SLA please stop by our booth #1406.  We’ll be demonstrating our Pulse Platform, and we’re about to release a number of new applications and some enhanced functionality.   I will be presenting at the B&F vendor "speed dating" session on Monday afternoon.  Since it’s only a train ride from NYC to DC, we plan to have a big team there, so please visit with us.

Alacra Street Pulse Named Content Showcase Favorite at CODiE Awards

Earlier this month, Alacra Street Pulse was awarded the Content Showcase Favorite award at the SIIA CODiE Awards, held in conjunction with the Software & Information Industry Assocation NetGain conference.

The Showcase Favorite was awarded to the content company which received the most votes during the CODiE Showcase, where dozens of companies demonstrated products to their peers, who then voted for their favorites.

More than just a new product, Alacra Pulse represents a completely new business model (freemium) for us, so we are that much more appreciative of the recognition.

I'd like to thank all of Alacra employees who have worked hard on the development of Alacra Pulse, some of whom are shown below.

(Right to left: Tony Bruni, Geoff Opland, Patrick Varas, Orly Lipshtat, Srinivas Karra, Simon Vileshin and Barry Graubart)

Is Linking Social Networks a Good Idea? I Don't Think So

The final panel of last week’s SIIA NetGain (#Netgain) conference covered social networking. Representatives of Facebook, Plaxo, Salesforce.com and LexisNexis were on the panel.   The conversation focused on how the different social networks were going to enable users to connect and share data between them.  There were a bunch of PowerPoint slides shown; one in particular illustrating how Facebook information can fit so nicely into Salesforce.com. 

The Facebook, Plaxo and Salesforce folks were telling the audience that they assume 1) people want and need the ability to have their various social network profiles linked, 2) the average user will be able to easily control who sees which bits of information among their various social networks and 3) this is the greatest thing.

It’s a given that everyone's privacy is a wasting asset but I still believe the panel is making terrible assumptions.  Many individuals currently keep their personal privacy and professional privacy separate and given a choice, a many would elect to keep them separate forever.  If I’m a contact in someone’s salesforce.com database I would never want them to have access to anything I might have posted to Facebook.  They don't need to know what my kids are up to.

While the social networks are not forcing users to link their profiles, it’s pretty difficult to reclaim something you have abandoned, even in an experiment.  And based on the panel discussion, the social networks will be encouraging experimentation.  Don’t do it.  The risk is greater than any possible reward.

Aside from the obvious risk – someone using salesforce.com or Plaxo sees some spring break photos or the odd groups you belong to on Facebook - there is the hacking risk.  A chain is only as strong as the weakest link and if someone can hack into a relatively insecure service that is linked to another, the data contained in all the linked services may be vulnerable.  I'm sure I don't want to participate in this picture from the Faceconnector website.  There's a reason they say not to mix business with pleasure.

 

Twitterdipity

The continuous serendipity of Twitter.

Last week I read with amazement Umair Haque’s post on the NY Times potentially buying Twitter.  As the numerous comments point out, this is financially impossible for the Times and would be strategically suicidal for Twitter.  It’s also hard to come up with a case where 2 businesses, each currently without a viable business model, combined to create something of great value.

Despite their rapidly fading business model, newspapers and magazines continue to offer readers something that has only recently been replicated on the web: serendipity.  You flip through the pages and see something you didn’t know you were interested until you read the headline or the first paragraph.  Or you saw the display or classified ad.  Something you weren’t sure you needed became something you immediately wanted because it was on sale. 

The “link economy” and RSS readers have been a poor substitute for print serendipity.  Links don’t flow and an RSS reader doesn’t achieve the anywhere near the right level of information triage.  There are tabs on my Netvibes page I haven't looked at in weeks.  This why aggregators, tapeworms they may be, play such an important role on the web for information filtering and presentation. 

Twitter, however, hits the serendipity home run.  You follow people whose interests may align with yours and they recommend stuff you might want to read. They provide a snippet or summary in 140 characters and you decide whether or not to click through.   If, over time, your interests and theirs diverge, you cancel your subscription – you just stop following.  To me it's not "what are you doing?"  It's "what are you reading?"  "What are you thinking about." 

Reading newspapers and magazines via Twitter is the best of all the online experiences I’ve tried – through an RSS reader, via email alerts, direct website access, or on a BlackBerry.  One format combines mainstream, alternative and “friend” media on any device.  And if I’m in the market for something, I can follow merchants who have goods and services on sale. 

Despite offering a serendipitous experience, print has lost its audience, and it's not coming back.  Seriously curious people will flock to Twitter as it is the most compelling, robust replacement. 

London for a Week

The Alacra Pulse UK tour starts Monday.  I'll be missing the NYC heat wave but it looks like it will be dry in London. 

Twitter for Business

Kudos to @graubart, @ppearlman, @harrisj and @pop17 for a terrific SIIA Brown Bag lunch on Twitter for Business.  The event was sold out and the webcast was flaky for awhile apparently because so many people were tuning in.  But once it got going the discussion and q/a were excellent.  There weren't necessarily any "aha" moments, but what came across was that, as Phil explained, it's still very early days.  Although there's lots of growth and hype, there's much going on behind the scenes at Twitter and at companies building on the Twitter platform.  "Just be awesome." Sarah's contribution was describing what was possible using Twitter - it can be used in exciting, engaging and imaginative ways. For Sarah, imaginative seems to be the operative word.  And again, the surface has barely been scratched. Ex-Alacra super developer and Twitter evangelist Jake Harris described how the NY Times is experimenting with many different Twitter feeds for different sections of the paper.  He lent some technology and established-company gravitas to the session.  Finally, Barry and the audience were superb. Barry did a great job moderating and I thought that the audience asked thoughtful questions, which is not always the case with these types of events.  The video of the session can be viewed on Barry's blog. 

From Fooled by Randomness

 "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic."  In context or out of context, that's an interesting sentence.  Page 60; Fooled by Randomness; Nassim Nicholas Taleb.