Can TTAGG Create Stock Market Alpha?

If a sufficient amount of money starts using a product like this, what's to stop me gaming it?<p>Step 1: I go long on Nike<p>Step 2: I use my ten thousand twitter sock puppets to tweet about how they just bought an awesome new pair of Nike shoes<p>Step 3: I watch as all the TTAGG users plunge money into Nike.<p>Step 4: Profit!

It seems like you would make more money keeping this technology secret and using it yourself or convincing a single investor to use it and share the proceeds. Why are you trying to market it?

So, can we please separate facts from fiction? The Forbes article states that TTAGG's back-end downloads all photos that users post on their Twitter accounts and then tries to recognize whether the users are wearing what they claimed to have purchased in their Tweets. Is this really the case? How can you tell apart a pair of American Eagle jeans from a pair of Levi's?

I work for a quantitative stock trading firm, and if this data is an effective predictor of stock returns you are underpricing it by a factor of about 4x to 25x. Most data providers charge at least $10,000/year, with the more effective ones charging in the six figures.<p>The primary thing a quantitative trader would want to see is a rigorous track record. Ideally this would be a "point in time" record where you record the information that would have been available as of a certain time in the past. If you don't have the data recorded for that, or it's for too short a time period, the next best thing would be to rerun your metric on all the historical tweets you can get your hands on.<p>Showing potential customers a mostly complete historical dataset of what you would have told them is a fairly common way of selling this sort of data. Don't show them anything too recent so that they need to buy the data from you. Firms have different investing processes, and so they often need to see a larger sample of data in order to know whether it fits well with how they invest.<p>Please feel free to contact me if you'd like to talk more about this -- my email is my handle at Google's mail service.

as an investor, i do wonder "if its working well consistently, why wouldn't they keep it a secret?" So that makes me immediately suspicious as to why I'd want to use it if it wasn't working well enough for you to use yourself.<p>Just curious how you answer that question b/c if returns are good enough, you should be able to raise money for a fund w/ no problem.

Unrelated, but part of a bunch of work my startup is doing is creating a set of new data sources around media coverage of big listed companies.<p>At the moment, we produce all the data retrospectively, but we could do it in real-time(ish). We think there's a strong chance that much of this information is tradeable, but we're very very busy doing the work that we sell to customers.<p>Anyone got any good ideas on how we go shopping for a customer for this data, given that we have no time? For some clients, we have many many data sources that aren't available publically(ish - we create the data from publically available data) going back several years for the marketing departments of some huge clients.<p>Presumably we need a quant who we trust with some time on their hands to play with it...

This looks quite fascinating. Like something Blue Ant would subscribe to.<p>But <i>From the wilds of Fayetville, Arkansas</i>? Please.<p>This looks like it might be disruptive, and in particular to an area that needs disruption.

i'm one of the founders in case anyone has any questions or feedback, thanks!

Hahaha, way to take the Recurly form and use it with Stripe. I did the same thing. I'm not too familiar with following the stock market, but good luck to you guys and the product looks great!

If this data is as actionable as it seems don't piecemeal subscriptions, you will rob yourself long term by dealing with all the headaches of direct-to-consumer(ish) selling.<p>Revisions and accuracy on the data set and protecting that IP is where you're going to extract maximum value.<p>A good place to start calling would be Bloomberg - they have dialed in how to extract maximum profit out of business data.<p>They have a venture division that would be a perfect fit <a href="http://bloombergventures.com" rel="nofollow">http://bloombergventures.com</a> and can push you in the right direction if they pass.

have you gained returns on trades yet?