The StreamBase Event Processing Blog

StreamBase & Phase Capital on CNBC: Trading on Twitter

Trading on Twitter: Opportunity, Danger, or Folly?

(Mark Palmer is the president and CEO of StreamBase Systems.  Follow him at twitter.com/mrkwpalmer)

This week my company issued what I thought was an innocuous announcement - our software now allows applications to process Twitter tweets with an application and analyze the contents of the messages in real-time. A firestorm of debate ensued, and the issue gained mainstream media coverage in the Financial Times, the Telegraph, CNBC,and dozens of others. The debate gives us pause to consider the role of the sweeping adoption of Twitter as a real-time, global information source, and how that information might be used beyond the mostly social nature of Twitter today.

One of the examples we cited for this technology is automated trading on Wall Street, where any of the 16 million tweets a day can be analyzed in real time as a means to inform trading decisions.  Wall Street tends to be an innovator with new technologies, so it’s useful to use it as a petri dish to examine some of the opportunities and issues around Twitter in a business context.

Trading on rumor is a time-honored trading technique.   “Buy on rumor; sell on news” is one of the oldest mantras on Wall Street and Main Street alike.  Any tool that improves the speed or quality of transmitting information is of interest to traders.  Twitter does that.   But be careful what you ask for – lots of the tweets on Twitter are garbage – scam artists and manipulators.  On the other hand, there are thousands of credible sources of information, from the SEC (@SEC_Investor_Ed), to the New York Times (@NYTimes), and even exchanges like CMEGroup (@CMEGroup), which has over 500,000 people subscribed to its tweets about the futures and options markets, and more. 

And beyond any individual source, and probably more uniquely, Twitter allows instant access to the sentiment of the masses.

In the Wall Street & Technology article, Todd C. Mirabella, chief investment officer and principal of New York hedge fund QAT, says one of the uses he has found for Twitter is to help look at market volatility and compare it. "So how we get our information, that's the trick. Twitter can give us information on retail " [Tweeters] are the herd," he says.

For example, anything new that Apple does throws Apple’s stock into volatile gyrations.  The recent launch of the iPhone 3GS set off a rash of Twitter tweets about what the herd thinks – taken together, they can reveal sentiment – good and bad. Getting that feedback a few seconds faster, or a little better can make a big difference in trading returns. 

Business leaders, from CEOs to inventors, use Twitter.  For example, Richard Branson (@richardbranson), the CEO of Virgin, tweets regularly.  Now I’m pretty sure the news in the first tweet about Jimmy Fallon isn’t actionable for trading Virgin stock, but the fact that he’s ordering $2.1 billion worth of new planes might be.

Nasir Zubairi, former product manager for algorithmic trading and FX E-commerce, RBS, put it this way in the Wall Street & Technology article:  "[Twitter can be] the fastest source of news, particularly in reference to trading and algorithmic trading," he says. "News feeds are gaining a lot of popularity. Twitter provides the medium in that people, who are there, experiencing things, are able to broadcast their sentiments to their user base via tweets. This provides lots of competitive advantage to firms with trading strategies."

News about world events moves the foreign currency markets as Mr. Mirabella also pointed out.  He’s not yet trading on Twitter but said he sees real use for Twitter in currency trading: "We like to trade in ranges," he explains. "That helps us characterize the extreme edges in any specific currency. We've been trying to follow more individualized Twitter sites to see if we can get extreme views [of Tweeters]. It does give us flavor for what types of ranges we're looking at."

But real use of Twitter has some serious issues.  Technically, it wasn’t built for the kind of quality of service that a robust news source, like Reuters (@Reuters), provides – what happens when Twitter is unavailable?  There are questions about latency of the transmissions – is it fast enough?  Can it be faster?  Authentication and forgery are challenges – there’s a big difference between the real Richard Branson (@richardbranson), and the fake Richard Branson (@sirdickbranson) - who is responsible for the quality and reliability of the information transmitted via Twitter?  Should it be regulated?

And regulatory issues abound, as well.  Trading decisions are moving faster, so regulators have to move more quickly, too.  In December the unfortunate trading run on United Airlines (UAL) (read the story from the Wall Street Journal) stock to drop from $12 to $3 in just 15 minutes only served to remind us how quickly conditions can change in an era of sweeping automation.  The chain reaction was started by an erroneous trading signal from an old story that the Google news crawler picked up from 2002.  How can we guard against these unintended technology-triggered mistakes?

The adoption of Twitter in a social context has been swift, massive, and global.   As technology like event processing makes the content contained in Tweets readily available to business applications, the questions of what to do with this power and responsibility looms large.

Postscript and continued debate (July 1, 2009)

Since this writing, there has been a flurry of response - positive, negative, and vitriolic.  

My favorite coverage was the excellent, balanced story by Melanie Rodier at Wall Street & Technology: Algo Traders Connect to Twitter. She did her homework, including comments by some well-respected people from the trading industry. Read it first.

CNBC's Day-Trading 2.0:  Twitter Takes on Stocks took a day-trader's view on using Twitter to understand market sentiment.  

The Telegraph's coverage, Hedge fund managers betting Twitter will give them an edge in rapid trading also covered the intelligence and military side of the potential use of Twitter.

A spirited message board debate on Server Side was provoked by John Davis (@jtdavis) from OnixS. Like many message board debates, there are rat holes, but there's good stuff there, too.

There was an assertion that StreamBase's announcement of Twitter connectivity is a cheap marketing gimmick. It isn't. This announcement was driven by current and anticipated customer demand, as you can see from our history of connecting to Alpha Trading, Interactive Data, Lime Brokerage, Reuters, other news and data sources of many types, and so on. The article you're reading illustrates the balanced way we're talking about Twitter.  

One blogger, who used to work for one of our competitors, TIBCO, even took the opportunity to predict that StreamBase will be trounced by the "big boys" as they enter our market! To that, I say: "bring it on." Dr. Michael Stonebraker is one of the inventors and thought leaders in event processing, and StreamBase is known as one of the leading businesses in the CEP market, renowned for its performance and ease of use. Are we wary of their deep pockets? Yes. But the big companies have yet to field compelling products - in fact, we rarely compete with them. Furthermore, the "big boys" have not showed signs of innovation and intrapreneurship as I wrote in When Microsoft enters your market:  cause for worry or cause for celebration? And in Innovation: why size doesn't matter, I countered the argument that big companies are the most effective at innovating in a market like CEP. Richard Tibbetts, StreamBase CTO, clarified IBM's recent claims of innovation as misleading in On IBM, unstructured data, and CEP.  Finally, and most importantly, our customer endorsements from CME Group, BNY ConvergEx, BlueCrest, and PhaseCapital and many more say it best - directly from our customer's mouths.

27 Twitter Lessons for CEOs

(Mark Palmer is the president and CEO of StreamBase Systems.  Follow him at twitter.com/mrkwpalmer)

I’m a CEO, and I use Twitter.  I started “tweeting,” or using Twitter, as a test a few months ago. When I told one of my board members, he was visibly shaken - all he knew about Twitter he had learned from his teenage daughter, and I could tell he wondered about my focus.  But as I engaged with it, I kept a list of the pros and cons from a business perspective.  At first, Twitter seemed like a big waste of time - but slowly, my list of pros grew, and my list of cons shrunk.  Three months later, I’m convinced that Twitter is an essential business tool.

I follow Twitter Tips (@twitter_tips), but I couldn't find a list of tips for CEOs from another CEO.  So, even though I was loath to post Yet-Another-Article-About-Twitter, I thought my list might be informative, fun, and best of all, already done.  So here's my private list of 26 Twitter lessons and observations:

1. The business case of Twitter is compelling.   Twitter, when combined with other social networking tools, deliver measurable and compelling business value.  Lots of it.

Since my companies started using social networking a few years ago, (blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on), we've reduced marketing spend by over 50% and roughly tripled marketing effectiveness (measured by lead generation volume, cost per lead, press coverage, and other quantitative metrics) - at the same time.  We showed the chart at the right at my last board meeting.  Marketing spend is the green area chart in back, and leads are in the bar chart. 

But let's not fan the already blazing flames of Twitter hype too much - although these numbers don't lie, they only tell part of the story.  There are essential elements of communication effectiveness that are just as important as the medium you use. For example, the quality of the content (see Lesson #19, Content is still king in the Twitter-sphere) matters more than whether you use Twitter or paper.   And its important to understand all social networking tools and use them properly, and in an integrated way (see Lesson #25, Learn how to Twublish).

Clay Shirky, in his excellent TED talk, makes the case that we are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history because it allows groups to communicate natively.  From a business perspective, it simply cannot be dismissed as a fad.

2. Do use Twitter to transmit values, standards, and ethics.  Peter Drucker said an essential job of the CEO is “to set the values, the standards, and the ethics of an organization.” Social networking helps me communicate my values, standards, and ethics to hundreds of people at once.  It’s like having hundreds of water cooler chats in real-time, from wherever I am - while I’m visiting a customer, speaking at a conference, or meeting with my board. 

That is, when I tweet (or blog) about the exciting things I see on the road, you can feel StreamBase’s enthusiasm for our customers.  When our CTO tweets about innovation, other technologists get a unique insider's view into the latest developments.  When I tweet about running the Boston Marathon (video on www.notallceosarejerks.com) for cancer research, I reveal my ethics. When I tweet about competitive announcements, prospects learn why our company is unique.

3. Do use Twitter for press relations – Old school PR is dead.  Journalists track CEOs for interesting stories – social networking helps you feed them.  Traditional PR agencies still have role, and most need to evolve.  I recently evaluated almost 20 press agencies, with a dominant eye to how well they understood social networking.  Only two had social networking deeply engrained in their culture; most were still stuck in the old days of point-to-point, relationship based PR.  PR firms must evolve, or die.

4. The mundane can be funny and constructive. Great tweets can be about mundane moments.  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (@zappos) is a master at it - here are three bad tweets I recently received, and 3 tweets from Tony about the same topics:

• BAD TWEET:  “Having coffee”
• GOOD TWEET:  “Had coffee w/ my mom, told her I gave a presentation @ Tony Robbins conference. She was really excited. In her words: "Wow! Robin Williams!"

• BAD TWEET: “Going into a meeting now” 
• GOOD TWEET: “Visited meetup.com office, met w/ CEO. Thankfully the meetup at meetup did not cause a rift in the space-time continuum”  

• BAD TWEET: “My allergies are killing me!”
• GOOD TWEET: “Taking allergy pills is like having Snow White multiple personality disorder. You go from Sneezy/Grumpy to Sleepy/Dopey/Happy.”

6. Do use Twitter for employee communication – Social networking is like a virtual water cooler, creating a steady, informal stream of communication about market events, customer stories, and the day-to-day developments in the company.

7. Do use Twitter to augment investor and analyst relations – Industry and financial analysts like getting a view direct from the CEO; they're busy and track a lot of companies, so the unobtrusive, expedient channel through social networking lets them track you without hours of briefings.

8. Do use Twitter for peer CEO learning – I follow other CEOs to see their observations - the good ones help shine a light on my own day.  My favorite sources are exectweets, searching for CEO at wefollow.com, or search for CEO at twellow.com.

9. Do use Twitter to promote rising stars – We recently promoted one of our founders, Richard Tibbetts (@tibbetts) to CTO.  He’s an amazing technologist, and getting him out and speaking is great for us, and great for the industry. Matt Fowles, one of our top engineers, has written some great technical blog entries. Twitter helps raise their visibility, and educate the market.

10. Define your Twitter goals carefully.   Signing up for Twitter is easy.  Writing tweets is easy.  But figuring out your goals for tweeting is hard. I already blog, write magazine articles, and speak at conferences, so it took me a while to figure out my list of goals for Twitter.  My main goal, of course, was lesson #2 - to transmit StreamBase's values, standards, and ethics.

11. Twitter can make you a better communicator - Strunk and White's rule: “omit meaningless words” is a great one, and Twitter forces you to omit meaningless words by its very structure - the discipline imposed by 140 characters is a good discipline.

12. Don’t use Twitter for traditional marketing. Some companies seem to think Twitter’s just another vehicle for traditional marketing.  H&R Block’s Stacey Gratz, marketing manager, explained: "[On Twitter,] we soon realized that we needed to listen and share, rather than pushing out marketing messages." Read about the H&R Block Twitter case study here.

13. Do use Twitter for thought leadership.  My company, StreamBase, is a leading visionary in an enterprise software market called event processing.  The market is still less than $100M, but it's growing, and controversial.  In a new area such as ours, education is important, and social networking provides another vehicle to educate prospects and customers. 

14. Do use Twitter to connect when you’re in the field – CEOs are always on the road, and sometimes it’s hard to connect.  Twitter is a great way to let prospects, customers, and analysts where you’ll be (if you want them to know).

15. Do use Twitter to transmit your brand's conscience.  Habit #1 of Bruce Philip's 5 Habits of successful executives:  “They are their brand’s conscience.”  Michael Hyatt (@MichaelHyatt) of Thomas Nelson Publishers does this well.  Richard Branson (@sirdickbranson) of Virgin does this well.  CME Group (@CMEGroup) has burst on the scene with over 420,000 followers about futures and options.  These tools allow direct communication and a great vehicle to allow customers and prospects to understand the essence of your brand and culture. 

16. Do use Twitter for product feedback and announcements.  Ford bet the marketing farm on social media for their Fiesta launch, and Twitter and blogging are the perfect vehicles to go more deeply on product features, and create general awareness. 

17. Do use Twitter to respond to rumors quickly.  Recently, we had to fire a well-known employee, and we got calls from false rumors that we were downsizing.  Twitter helped me do that in 2 minutes with 140 characters.

18. Don’t use Twitter to sell.  I’ve seen a lot of overt selling “my new book is available for $19.99! – buy it now!”  Yuk.

19. Don’t inadvertently give too much competitive information away.  I couldn’t tweet for a whole week because if the competition knew I was in Chicago, I would have jeopardized a sales situation.

20. Content is still king in the Twitter-sphere.  Even though Twitter messages are only 140 characters, the quality of those 140 characters is still king.   The link between content quality and business value (lesson #1) is direct.

21. Turn your communications approach upside down. If you haven't already noticed, there are plenty of proclamations that the death of the corporate web site is upon us, that traditional journalism and PR is dead, and that product management can be more effective using Twitter.  Each of these statements is at least partially true.  

When the Cluetrain Manifesto (about the book, short form, the entire ebook,) boldly and simply stated that a “powerful global conversation had begun,” they were right – and the time has come for every business to rethink their communication strategy.

22. Don’t compete with SpongeBob.  My 8-year-old son, Jack, asked what I was doing one day.  I told him I was tweeting, and told him what Twitter is.  He asked:  “How many people follow you?” 

I said:  “about 500.” 

Jack asked: “How many people follow Sponge Bob?”

I looked it up.  “5,000.” 

Jack said:  “Dad - if you tell more jokes, maybe you’ll be more popular.”

I don’t want to compete with SpongeBob.  I’m don’t care how many followers I have.  Neither should you!

23. Don’t tweet too much; don’t tweet too little. You get a lot of benefits from Twitter for just 10 minutes of effort a day.  On the other hand, it’s important not to tweet too much - I recently saw someone who had tweeted 26,000 times – yikes!  My rule of thumb is to tweet between 0 to 3 times a day.  That's about as many truly insightful things as I encounter in 24 hours.

24. Twitter helps keep me informed in real-time, personally, with less effort, and dynamically.  Today one of our engineers asked:  “doesn’t Twitter just give you too much information?”  My response was that it’s the opposite – it helps me cull the information deluge down to the stream I care about.  Currently, I listen to:

• The New York Times (@nytimes)
• NPR (@nprnews)
• My favorite industry analysts (@bmichelson)
• My competitors (you know who you are)
• My customers (CME Group, and many more)
• My cousin (@marissapage) who’s really, really funny. 
• Other CEOs (many to mention, check out my followers)

I’m informed in real-time, as news happens, and my list of information streams is very personal.

It’s less effort with Twitter to add new sources, scan existing ones, and read from my iPhone than traditional mediums, including personalized websites.  And the 140 character Twitter constraint, makes people “put it on a bumper sticker,” so I can scan the headlines.  I’ve never been more informed in such little time.

Finally, the whole thing is dynamic, so I can constantly change what I’m tuned into.

25. Don’t start using Twitter unless you love to communicate, and are willing to stay committed.  It’s hard to get in the habit of tweeting, and CEOs are busy!  Moreover, tweeting well is an art, and takes some thinking.  You have to want to communicate, and be willing to stay committed to creating ideas on your own; you can’t outsource the job, either.

26. Learn how to Twublish.  I used to write byline articles for industry journals. Traditional publishing is static, formal, unidirectional, and controlled by an external editor.  Then I started to blog, connect via LinkedIn, share photos with FlickR, and message with Twitter.  Taken together - and they must be used together - these tools form a new way of publishing - I think of it as "Twublishing."  

To publish with Twitter, or Twublish, involves writing to our blog.  Then I tweet about points in the article on Twitter.  Comments in the blog and direct messages on Twitter help me get feedback on the quality of my thinking.  Often, this leads me to new places, and adjacent topics.  Or I more fully develop the original idea, and more deeply hyperlink the original to new sources I discover.  The feedback deepens the original thought and creates articles that evolve into portals for other information on the same topic.  This post, for example, has links to 30 other information sources about the use of Twitter from a CEO's perspective.  

Twublishing is dynamic, informal, bi-directional, and unconstrained by an editor.  I can mix in video and images.  It's hyperlinked so my thoughts can become portals to other people's ideas that were the building blocks of my own.  And it's temporal - that is, as information changes over time and others respond, I can update or augment the original to refer to the new information.  

Other than the whopping $250 I used to occasionally get for a magazine article, publishing with social networking tools is better in every way.  

27. I’m more aware of why I love my job because of Twitter.  As I was returning from a sales trip, I tweeted:  “Anyone who thinks the capital markets are collapsing should go out and spend a day with the traders – lots of innovation going on out here!”  The act of paying attention to the ironic, funny, shocking, and curious things that happen from day to day makes me more aware of why I love my job.