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!

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.