As we have written recently, there aren’t many firms that are providing institutional quality research coverage for the crypto currency markets. However, StockTwits has recently launched a unique alternative data set derived from the messages seen over its network pertaining to various crypto currencies.
StockTwits New Product Launch
Founded in 2009, StockTwits is a social media platform designed for the sharing of ideas between investors, traders, and entrepreneurs. StockTwits created the $TICKER tag to “stream” information around stocks and markets across the web. Today, StockTwits has approximately 1.4 million registered users, 600,000 of whom actively post thoughts or investment ideas about a company and its stock. For a number of years, StockTwits has marketed investor sentiment data based on these online posts and conversations to some of the world’s largest asset managers to drive trading strategies.
On June 1st 2017, StockTwits launched its coverage of the cryptocurrency markets enabling investors to post messages on close to 100 cryptocurrencies. However, as you can see from the chart below message volume on these cryptos didn’t really start to pick up until late in November when the price of Bitcoin eclipsed $9000. Currently more than 40,000 investors per month are posting messages on cryptocurrencies via the StockTwits platform.
Consistent with the kind of social sentiment data that StockTwits has traditionally produced and marketed to systematic investors, the firm is now producing sentiment data on these crypto oriented messages. As you might guess, the one big difference between the crypto data and all of StockTwits other sentiment data is the lack of history for this dataset. However, given the fact that there are no other comparable investor sentiment data on the crypto currency markets, a few investors have been willing to give this new dataset a try. Currently, less than a handful of investors have licensed the new crypto datafeed, while more than a dozen firms are actively testing it.
Our Take
Although StockTwits’ new alternative cryptocurrency dataset has very little history, it is extremely unique as there are even fewer data providers in this space than there are institutional research providers.
The big question is whether StockTwits can lure a growing number of crypto investors to its platform and whether these investors will choose to continue posting relevant messages via their network. However, given the success the firm has had so far, we would not be surprised if StockTwits is able to continue to build a vibrant community of crypto investors, thereby enabling it to collect and market an extremely interesting alternative dataset for institutional cryptocurrency investors.
For those interested in learning more about Stocktwits’ new crypto dataset, contact:
Mr. Pierce Crosby
Director, Business Development & Revenue Strategy
707-223-6100
pierce@stocktwits.com