I had a great breakfast this morning with Lindzon and Mick from Research Edge. Mick brought up the idea of centralizing accountability which I loved and which dovetails nicely with my piece on StockTwits and transparency.
The idea is that up unitl now we have had all of these market pundits squawking whatever they want even when it means losing people tons of money with little accountability. They just disappear for a while when they are wrong and pop up again when viewers or readers forget how bad their calls were the last go round or they ignore what theyve said and move on to the next prediction as if they had not screwed the pooch. Or in still other cases, they just go back and edit what theyve said which is clearly dispicable.
More recently, we have tools like youtube and individual blogs where users can take some idiot comments that a guy has made on the CNBC and rebroadcast them. This is awesome!
Nevertheless, we need to take that next step and centralize accountability so that we have an organized record of market calls people make that is easily accessible so that consumers can examine the history of predictions in order to vet competency.
We are working towards that at StockTwits, building a record of what our users say and we find that its working pretty well naturally as users gravitate to and follow the best while neglecting and even calling out those who get it wrong and who fail to own up on their own.
Ultimately, it is up to us to provide a platform capable of centralizing accountability and to our users to vet.
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