Now, anyone who trades in the financial markets is desperate to find even the slightest edge over his or her competitors. Even the shortest gap where you know something, and no one else does, could be potentially half a goldmine. And, now it is being told that Hedge Fund denizens are using Twitter to collect even faster information. StreamBase, a maker of software, monitors Tweets for real time price sensitive data to analyze and hand to traders. This is going to be comical.
Can you name a less reliable service than Gmail Twitter? Now, imagine using Twitter to place bets of over $1,000,000! I can imagine the day traders, frantically refreshing Search.Twitter.com trying to figure out why it is 3 hours behind real time, and why they lost the GDP of a small nation. Perhaps there will even be lawsuits over the tagline of Twitter search: “See Whats Happening – Right Now.”
Final thought: if you are going to be trading with Twitter data, what stops me from the gaming the hell out of what you read? I would wager that these Hedge Fund people are not your average Silicon Valley types. I bet they would not get the difference between a spammer and a real person on Twitter, half of the time. So I can farm 100 accounts, and spread bad information, and then profit from the stock swings. Bad plan everyone.
Tip: services such as Twitter should be played for entertainment only, not for investment purposes.
