The Traderszone Network

After breaking away from Twitter awhile back, the investing site StockTwits is rolling out a number of new features that it hopes will draw in more traders. The site, still in beta and billed as a real time platform for stock traders to share information, has a desktop AIR application that includes video, news and charts.

Following the acquisition of Chart.ly last year, StockTwits acquired the small but influential financial news site Abnormal Returns in January of 2010. AR features curated news as well as original content about the financial markets and stocks. StockTwits is reportedly taking that platform and adding its real time news and information feed from the StockTwits network.

The company has raised $4.6 million over three rounds of funding and was originally built on top of the Twitter platform. In late 2009 they launched a desktop version of the product and moved to their own messaging platform. In addition to contributing trading strategies via blog posts and video, some of the things StockTwits users will be able to do on the new site are watching suggested user streams, perusing charts shared by other users, checking out specific filtered ticker pages and watching the 24-hour StockTwits TV stream.

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Stock trader Timothy Sykes is apparently one of the first people to sign up for a new premium Twitter service, SuperChirp, that allows publishers to charge for their twit streams. Sykes is telling his current 3,200+ followers on Twitter to sign up for his $9.99/month “premium” SuperChirp Twitterstream quickly because in his own words “…rest assured, I ain’t doing anything for $10/month, grab this deal now because I can guarantee you, my private Twitterfeed will be more like $99-$499/month.” Sykes goes on to say that he’s not exactly sure how he will integrate SuperChirp into the rest of his product offerings but he continues by saying “…prices are going up to $50/month next week in a further effort to weed out people too poor/leveraged/unfit to trade.”

Sykes, a big presence on Covestor, is obviously not without his detractors. Gawker.com columnist Ryan Tate declares SuperChirp as, “a new company [that] allows you to pay for select tweets. To prove this is a terrible idea, fallen loudmouth banker Tim Sykes has jumped on board.” Tate goes on to describe the service as “… bravely going into the business of selling access to Twitterized brain farts.” And continued by saying that Sykes ended his hedge fund career in 2007 with foolish stock bets, earning the title “Trading’s Buffoon.”

While Gawker and Sykes appear to have some history together, all bombast aside, Sykes does have a fairly impressive track record at the relatively transparent Covestor. In addition, we here at traderszone.net have long thought that Twitter, or some similar type of service, could end up being a valuable aide to investors who want access to a variety of data sources in a real-time , lightweight and low-cost manner. Perhaps this is the beginning of that evolution.