print email stumble Digg

Stock Talk

Peter Severinson

| January 2, 2008

Image by: Jupiter Images

Blogs, bulletin boards and news groups are already packed with trading tips and market hints from hordes of type-happy traders, but sorting the pearls from the piffle is a challenge. Stockgroup Information Systems Inc. president and CEO Marcus New is betting the company’s new Stockhouse websites can change all that.

“There’s one big fundamental problem with user-generated content, and that’s quality,” he says. “The problem is... that there’s a lot of stupid information; you have to do a lot of work.”

Stockhouse.com and stock house.ca deliver reams of quotes, news bites and comments to 800,000 visitors a month, New says. Much of this comes through traditional channels such as news releases and quarterly reports. User-generated content can offer unique insights, New says, because Stockhouse members might gather valuable unreported information from conferences, conventions or meetings. But if there’s so much of it and it’s so broad, how do you know what’s useful and reliable?

New’s answer is part technology, part sociology. Members can post their news and comments, but postings are rated by the software and by other members. Posts are ranked mathematically based on the quality of the author’s portfolio. (Many members manage their portfolios through Stockhouse services.) Any member can rate the comments of any other, and the critiques are reflected in yellow boxes that adorn each post on the site, with scores for clarity, credibility, usefulness and overall quality.

In theory the critical mob will promote the wise and banish the incompetents and frauds. The quality measure should become increasingly accurate as more members participate (provided the average critic is, indeed, trying to be helpful).

It’s hard to see the results yet, as most posters have zeros in all their scores. This is likely because the system is new and the crowd just hasn’t managed to rank everything yet. But it does leave you with a persistent question: is a post with a zero worthless, or has it just not been rated yet?

Guess there’s still some sifting to do.

Tags

I have happily used

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2008-04-03 04:46.

I have happily used stockhouse.ca for years and the "new stockhouse" is anything but an improvement. In fact, I've just about abandoned a site I visited daily due to the social networking features. Speaking of which, did anyone ask if the users felt they needed a ranking system. I come to the site for easy access financial info., not to enter a popularity contest. Yet the site now screams how many boards I've visited, how many posts I've made, tracking by other users, etc. This is big brother at it's finest. I don't need to factor in who might be staring over my shoulder everytime I make a board post or see three little circles evaluating the content of my poster character. God knows how much money was spent reworking stockhouse. I hope New loses his job over this, he doesn't have to do the grunt work of execution and yet freed of the mundane he can't make sound decisions on a macro level. I can just see the hoop jumping presentations in the meetings to give him the feeling that he is doing something (because apparently he felt the site employees were doing nothing). As I said, I'm pi***ed, I really enjoyed the website and especially one that was devoted to the Canadian market. Talk about fixing what wasn't broke.