Can TTAGG Create Stock Market Alpha?

Step 1: I go long on Nike

Step 2: I use my ten thousand twitter sock puppets to tweet about how they just bought an awesome new pair of Nike shoes

Step 3: I watch as all the TTAGG users plunge money into Nike.

Step 4: Profit!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Presumably we need a quant who we trust with some time on their hands to play with it...

But From the wilds of Fayetville, Arkansas? Please.

This looks like it might be disruptive, and in particular to an area that needs disruption.

Revisions and accuracy on the data set and protecting that IP is where you're going to extract maximum value.

A good place to start calling would be Bloomberg - they have dialed in how to extract maximum profit out of business data.

They have a venture division that would be a perfect fit http://bloombergventures.com and can push you in the right direction if they pass.