Love talking about stocks on Twitter but aren't as interested in what people have to say about Justin Bieber? A new web tool targeting traders can enhance Twitter feeds with more information on stocks -- and help cut through the cacophony of tweets that aren't focused on the market.
The financial website LikeFolio recently launched a Stock In-Sites extension for Google's (GOOG) Chrome browser which highlights tweets that have so-called "cashtags" -- a company's ticker symbol with a dollar sign in front of it. $AAPL is the Apple (AAPL) cashtag for example. The extension also inserts streaming price quotes directly into the Twitter feed.
With the click of one more button, users can weed out any non-stock chatter. By clicking the dollar sign at the top of the Twitter page, only tweets that include cashtags will appear in the Twitter stream.
With an additional click on a cashtag, the web extension slides open a "stock info dock" that provides a quick description of the company as well as a link to a Twitter stream with all the tweets that include that company's cashtag.
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"We wanted to build something for Twitter users who are interested in the stock market," said LikeFolio founder Andy Swan. "We wished this existed, so we created it."
The cashtag was first created by social investing site StockTwits, and implemented by Twitter in 2012. Traders and investors on StockTwits use cashtags to talk about stocks and funds in 140-character posts and often share those on their Twitter accounts as well. (CNNMoney has a partnership with StockTwits.)
While the web extension is aimed at traders, LikeFolio also targets newcomers to investing. The site combs through likes, status updates and check-ins within an individual's Facebook and Twitter networks for mentions of brands and products. It then surfaces the five most talked-about companies as possible investment ideas.
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But eventually, Swan envisions broadening the functionality of LikeFolio so that it also appeals to active investors and traders, and incorporates the information from the Twitter tool.
"Our mission is to find the financial signal in social noise," he said.
LikeFolio has an ongoing partnership with TD Ameritrade (AMTD), so users with trading accounts on that platform can see real-time streaming quotes and a one-week chart in the stock info dock.
So far, the web extension is only available on Chrome. But it is slated to come to Mozilla Firefox early next week.
