Fancy yourself a savvy investor, trader, or financial wizard? You can now find others--just like yourself!

It's close to crowd sourcing, but not exactly.

There's an axiom in the financial world that goes something like this:  If someone tries to sell you a formula for financial success, you can be sure that it won't work.  The reason here is obvoious:  If the proportedly magic-ingenious-secret formula really generated untold wealth--i.e., it actually "worked" like it was supposed to--why then would someone be selling you the concept--or the actual step-by-step instructions to gain access to unspeakable wealth--in the first place?  In other words, why wouldn't the seller of such information simply employ it to their own ends--instead of trying to peddle it to you for $39.95?!!!

But what if someone wants to give you something for free?

Well, there's a site to check out for what is called social stock picking, Stocktwit.com.  It's a virtual trading floor where users like you and I can share ideas and data in real time without any cost associated with taking or leaving financial insights.  Over 300,000 people visit it each month to seek out virtual traders, find aggregated financial news feeds, obtain user-submitted technical charts, to locate what amounts to a strip-mall of experts selling advice for a fee, and non-celebrity talking-heads giving commentary and advice.  

This is not exactly crowdsourcing--for it's a little too free-form to be thought of that way, but it's close.  Here you have lay-people sharing their best financial ideas and information at a social level because they believe that collectively there's value in approaching a complex, complicated endeavor--mostly because the internet makes it possible and easy to do exactly that.  It's sort of like "shareware" for money people, financial news and strategy junkies, and arm-chair investment planners.  If you think of it that way, it's probably safe to say some of it is good and useful and some of it, well, is junk.  

What's the value of stocktwit.com?

Here's the potential value:  You know that at least it's not as useless as the stuff direct-mailers are trying to sell you [remember, we talked about this at the beginning].  Instead, you might find useful information there, if someone who knew and understood financial matters better than you do...and who decided to share that wisdom with the world, obviously through stocktwit.com.  But how can you be sure about that--that is the real dilemma!  

So the issue of the profit motive I mentioned the start--for Stocktwits.com, at least--comes back to this:  You may or may not make money using information provided free by others [and others may or may not make money using the information you provide for them to see], but the operators of StockTwits.com will...not so much from the tips they get from people like you and others like you--but from the money advertisers give them for attracting people like you to their site in the first place!  

_______________________________________________________________

Become a fan of Keith Murray on Facebook and follow his updates on Twitter.