Axius Expands Market EarlyBird Offering, Bows Hot Tweets

First launched last year, the application was built by Danny Watkins, former head of technology at BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking subsidiary of Canada's Bank of Montreal, to help traders, investors, analysts and research professionals use Twitter in a more compliant way.

In the past few months, the vendor has developed a new service offering to help customers set up the application to target specialist and niche markets, such as mid-cap stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market.

"We are talking to clients such as specialist hedge funds and brokers who are interested in a different market to where we have been so far. They are much more specialist and interested in smaller companies. With big companies such as Apple and Microsoft, or anything in the S&P 500, it's easy to find information on Twitter, but it's hard with smaller specialist markets, so what we are doing for these customers is a service offering where we sit down and work out what accounts they need to follow and how much spam reduction to set up," Watkins says.

One of the biggest problems faced by firms using Twitter is filtering out noise, Watkins says. Typically, the vendor uses a proprietary "clout" score─which indicates the importance of a Twitter account─as well as cashtags to filter out finance-relevant news from Twitter noise. However, since cashtags have not been adopted as widely for smaller companies, it is harder to filter out spam, he adds.

"In alternative markets, we've had to open up the search more widely. As people are not using the ticker, they become more complicated, or they partially name the companies. So we are working with customers to develop searches that pick up some things without picking up other rubbish. When people deploy our application, they don't want to start with empty screen, so we'll do the analysis." Watkins describes the offering as creating longer-term partnerships with clients, as the relevant information and accounts are constantly changing.

Separately, Axius has launched a beta version of new feature, dubbed Hot Tweets, which identifies tweets that are getting engagement. The vendor measures the typical level of retweets and favorites for specific Twitter accounts, and monitors when these levels are higher than normal, to indicate tweets that are likely to be of interest to traders, which it displays in red on the application.

"Twitter is struggling for its user base because unless you are looking at it all the time, tweets have gone off the bottom and you've missed it. We are solving that problem, so instead of wading through the noise, the interesting stuff comes to you," Watkins says.