The recently launched service Piqqem is premised on the idea that, collectively, we all know more about companies and the potential value of their stocks than do we individually — even than seasoned traders. From the FAQ:
Piqqem differs from other sites in that we believe the crowd has more knowledge than any single individual. Instead of looking for the best individual stock picker and weighting votes based on investment ability, we look at aggregate opinion and allow everyone to vote as much as they want. This orientation towards crowd wisdom manifests itself in our crowd indicators, such as top rated stocks, most active stocks, stocks with most rising sentiment, and stocks with most falling sentiment.
In theory, the aggregate data generated through Piqqem will enable its users to make better decisions about which stocks to buy and sell, by allowing users to vote on individual companies in order to make predictions. Most recently, Piqqem alerted SmartMobs to their new integration with Twitter, as a potentially powerful tool for analyzing and influencing the stock market.
The stock market is, of course, itself already a product of collective thought, if unpredictably so. It will be interesting to see whether non-expert users take up a service like Piqqem, or if its users remain those already knowledgeable about equities and the world of finance.
Comments
@ 15:56
Twitter is a great way to gather information relating to the stock market. Piqqem is a great idea.
@ 18:08
Thanks for posting on us and our Twitter integration. I agree that the stock markets are already userful prediction markets but we believe they are subject to significant distortions due to the outsize influence of prominent analysts and large institutions. For example, if Goldman Sachs makes a call on a stock, it often reacts that same day. Perhaps that is crowd sentiment but its highly reactive rather than predictive. And, by the same token, how far in the future current stock market prices are predictive is a subject of debate. That might be the options market, which is a hard analogy because it plays by very different rules than the stock market. At any rate, thanks much for pointing out our new Twitter feature and we’ll most definitely keep you posted!
@ 13:12
Wisdom of the crowd in the stock market has been proven by http://www.predictwallstreet.com, a pioneer in the field. A white paper shows the performance of their forecasts, which are based on user predictions: http://www.predictwallstreet.com/News/Publications/Investing021109.pdf.
It shows that between May 24, 2007 to December 31, 2008, the PredictWallStreet forecasts yielded a return of 41.42%, while the SPY (SP500) returned -58.37% using the same investing strategy.
You can follow PredictWallStreet’s general market sentiment on Twitter @predict.
Hope to see you there.