• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 10, 2015

Investment decisions are (supposedly) guided by information -- but also conjecture, speculation, rumor, and hearsay, not to mention plain ol’ lies. Business news and data providers like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal do their best to feed investors’ insatiable desire for information, but no news organization could possibly cover the entire universe of relevant content. For example, back in 2011, who guessed that floods in Thailand would reduce world industrial production by 2.5%?

Well, some clever soul out there probably did predict the likely effects of supply chain disruptions, but they didn’t necessarily have a platform to share their insights. A new social media platform, TickerTags, is aiming to change that by crowd-sourcing investment news, allowing anyone to contribute to the market’s state of knowledge via hashtagged posts. 

TickerTags combines natural language processing and collaborative curation by real human beings to sort, analyze, and publish information relating to 8,000 publicly traded companies with over 350,000 tags. Curators with expertise about specific companies ensure relevance by reviewing every tag, including both human- and machine-generated, for context and associations.

The platform scans news and social posts in real time, so investors can identify trends and sentiment changes in forums like Twitter as well as online news, blogs, and other business news sources. Users can sort and filter the content to discover and track relevant tags; during its beta phase, investors who register can add and monitor up to 40 private tags, which aren’t publicly viewable, to inform their own investment decisions. There’s also a customized API for institutional investors and traders.

TickerTags co-founder Chris Camillo explained: “There is a tremendous amount of information connected to securities not being reviewed by investment analysts and traders today. Our taxonomy of tags serve as a bridge and filter to parse the world’s information streams for relevancy without human bias. We monitor all conceivable tags that have the potential to impact a company's business, investor confidence, or public perception.”

In addition to its potential utility for investors looking for profit, the TickerTags platform could be useful as a tool for quickly correcting quashing rumors intended to destabilize markets, including misinformation circulated by mistake or out of malice by individuals or governments engaged in cyber-financial warfare.

In January 2013 a report from the World Economic Forum warned that deliberate or accidental spreading of misinformation, termed “digital wildfires” by the report, could result in mass stock sell-offs as well as even more serious consequences like disorganized, panicked mass evacuations resulting in thousands of deaths. Subsequently some academics have suggested that governments need to create emergency response systems to swiftly dispel misinformation online -- but crowd-sourced fact-checking and peer review could play a major role too.