Howard Lindzon is one of my favorite bloggers – he’s extremely witty and generally covers topics at the intersection of technology and finance.
He is the founder of Wall Strip (exited to CBS) and the co-founder of StockTwits. In addition to being an active angel investor in New York startups he also writes a fantastic blog.
In one of his recent posts, Howard freely shares a brilliant concept I think is ahead of its time.
In my post on Brand Reputation Optimization I suggested in the future brands will be constantly monitored and evaluated to ascertain trends, customer feedback, etc, in the same way the Central Intelligence Agencies purportedly scrapes data from Facebook. This will usher in a new era of real-time insight and transparency for consumers and for competitors performing competitive intelligence.
In a recent post, Howard explains how he uses this same concept to gain alpha in his stock trades. Howard uses various applications and workflows to monitor public companies like Crocs (CROX) and he’s been able to turn the resulting data into a competitive trading advantage.
Monitoring websites in real-time for consumer trends and patterns is the wave of the future and is already being done by hedge funds. Soon this will be common place. It’s also a similar concept to Workstreamer’s ability to track job title and workplace changes in real-time.