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.

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On Trading and Twitter, the Exchange of Ideas

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

We are a people of trade. Trading is what we do. Trade was the main activity of our prehistoric ancestors -- at least those who weren't out hunting and gathering; they bartered or exchanged goods and services with one another before money was invented.

According to Peter Watson, author of Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, the history of long-distance commerce dates from around 150,000 years ago.

It was on the Twitter "exchange of ideas" that got me thinking about this on Saturday. (I would have blogged about this on Sunday, but I was observing #twitterfreesunday, which I started to try to control my habit.)

My pal Howard Lindzon tweeted the following:

really just amazing how many people trade as a living or passion. starting to think our market is huge. 2:56 PM Feb 28th from TweetDeck

And I responded:

@howardlindzon Isn't trading what human beings do and have always done? From the old marketplaces to baseball cards as kids in the US 4:32 PM Feb 28th from TwitterBerry

To which Todd Stottlemyre, who trades from Arizona, weighed in:

@greenskeptic great point, wish I had all the Mickey Mantle cards my Dad use to bring home to me 4:34 PM Feb 28th from TweetDeck in reply to greenskeptic

Then Jaculynn Peterson of Portland, Oregon, added to the conversation:

@greenskeptic @howardlindzon Eugene OR survives on a trade economy. Why I think this city will fare better than others in coming years 4:34 PM Feb 28th from web

And so did the always enigmatic Deepak Das of New York, who said, "Currently I think my stamp collection from 20 years ago is worth more than my stock portfolio." (IU don't doubt him.)

What I love about Twitter is how quickly our idea exchange pays off. We toss out an idea and people trade off it and each other. That is our trade.

The willing exchange of ideas? Priceless.

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Ecosystem Benefits: Brand and Fink Creating Markets for Nature's Services

Next month's Wired Magazine features a piece by David Wolman on efforts by "eco-capitalists" to create new markets for the life-sustaining services provided by Nature. That's right. Call it natural capital, ecosystem services (see my earlier post on that subject), environmental markets, ecological assets, or as my former colleague John Kinch and I coined it, ecosystem benefits. Whatever. These are the services provided by nature free of charge -- or free until now.

In an effort to create viable markets for such services as clean water, storm surge protection, and greenhouse gas build-up, people like David Brand, founder of New Forests Pty Limited, and Priceline.com cofounder Jessie Fink, among others, "are betting that successful trading of carbon will kick-start the creation of other cap-and-trade systems for ecological services like watershed protection, biodiversity, and erosion control."

Read more @ Wired: Eco-Capitalists