06 October 2009

StockTwits Holds StockCamp at the NASDAQ Market Site

Meant to blog about this over the weekend, but got distracted.

I attended the first StockCamp hosted by StockTwits at the NASDAQ Market Site in New York City on Friday.

The event was broken into two sessions -- morning and afternoon -- of about 4 hours each. I was at the afternoon session, which was packed with lively dialog on a range of trading subjects, including tools of the trade with StockTwits regulars Brian Shannon (@alphatrends) and Joe Donohue (@upsidetrader), tape reading and price behavior with Steven Place (@stevenplace), Mike Bellafiore (@smbcaptial) and Quint Tatro (@tickerville).

Many of the StockTwits stable can be found on the stream and hosting web-tv shows about their specific trading concepts and ideas. Think of it as the anti-CNBC.

There was also a mind-opening or mind-bending conversation with MacroTwits host Gregor Macdonald (@gregormacdonald), along with Jim Goebetz (@aiki14), Jason Wood (@Wood83), and David Aferiat (@tradeideas). Their subject? The Changing Economic Landscape, which ranged from gold to Australian and New Zealand currency to the complacency of the American public. Heady stuff.

Keeping it all light and frothy was host Howard Lindzon (@howardlindzon), one of the founders of StockTwits, which has been built over the past year to include a desktop application, a web-tv network, subscription blogs, and now its own branded conferences.

With so much intellectual capital and social leverage, can an acquisition of StockTwits be that far off? Rumor has it Howard was meeting with Google Finance last Thursday, so who knows?

My three take-aways from StockCamp:

1.) Have a plan;
2.) Be disciplined;
3.) Next time Howard has an idea, and you're around at the beginning of it, make sure you have a piece of it.