NYC Start-up TickerHound Partners with NASDAQ

Having recently celebrated TickerHound's 1-year Anniversary as a public site, I couldn't be happier to announce our first significant technology partnership with a financial media/tech company: The NASDAQ OMX Group (Symbol: NDAQ).

If you go to www.nasdaq.com you can now find TickerHound's Q&A widgets sprinkled across the site. To dive into the co-branded application we built for them just go to http://answers.nasdaq.com.

This is a big moment for the entire team here and we can't wait to roll out some of the other partnerships we have on deck!

Press release is below:


NEW YORK, Apr. 9, 2009 -- TickerHound.com and the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today introduced NASDAQ Answers on Nasdaq.com. This new, real-time Question & Answers platform provides Nasdaq.com users with unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor.

“We’re very excited that NASDAQ, which has a long history of technological innovation in finance, has chosen TickerHound as one of its first social media offerings,” said Wayne Mulligan, TickerHound’s CEO. “NASDAQ’s implementation of TickerHound is a strong endorsement of our brand. We welcome Nasdaq.com’s support in fulfilling our mission of educating and empowering individual investors.”

"NASDAQ Answers provides an intuitive way for individual investors to ask questions and get answers from other users," said Bruce Hashim, Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Interactive Services. "TickerHound made it easy to integrate their robust software suite and we’re confident these social media features will significantly improve the NASDAQ.com user experience."

Now live on Nasdaq.com, Nasdaq Answers allows users to freely browse questions and answers across a variety of investment-related categories. Free registration with a valid email address is required for users to post or respond to questions. Visit http://answers.nasdaq.com to participate in the discussion.

For more information on NASDAQ Answers, visit http://answers.nasdaq.com.

About TickerHound:

TickerHound is a community-powered education website for individual investors. Launched in 2007 the company has focused on creating a scalable and extensible Q&A platform and partnering with top-tier financial media brands. TickerHound’s goal is to provide unbiased, community-powered education for the individual investor. TickerHound provides its partners with a turnkey solution that will allow them to create, customize and quickly deploy their very own Q&A Community. The company plans to announce more white-label community-powered education features on other websites in the near future. For more information, visit www.tickerhound.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

The matters described herein contain forward-looking statements that are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about NASDAQ Market Pathfinders and NASDAQ OMX Group's other products and offerings. We caution that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond NASDAQ OMX Group's control. These factors include, but are not limited to factors detailed in NASDAQ OMX Group's annual report on Form 10-K, and periodic reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to release any revisions to any forward-looking statements.

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It's About Education, NOT Information

For investors, a proper education and investing framework should always trump access to "immediate information".

I know that automated information aggregation, synthesis and analysis is all the rage on Wall Street these days. Banks, traders and hedge funds are all jockeying to get the news first, fastest and interpreted in the most efficient manner.

But with the announcement that financial "intelligence" firm, Monitor110 will be shut down, it gives me reassurance that TickerHound's on education as opposed to information was the right path.

Case in Point:

This is currently the top headline on Yahoo! Finance (the largest financial portal on the web in terms of traffic):

Stocks trade higher on upbeat earnings results - Stocks are opening higher after stronger-than-expected quarterly results from names like Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and United Technologies Corp. gave investors some reassurance about the health of the economy.

Ok, now if I were a regular Joe, I'd look at that headline and think, "Oh wow, looks like JP Morgan is pulling through and doing well despite all the turmoil in the financial markets."

But that wasn't the case at all.

In fact, the company's year-over-year profits were off by 53%!

And the comments from the company's CEO, Jamie Dimon, weren't particularly optimistic either:

"the economic environment to continue to be weak -- and to likely get weaker -- and for the capital markets to remain under stress." He added that "since substantial risks still remain on our balance sheet, these factors will likely affect our business for the remainder of the year or longer."

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound very encouraging to me.

But the stock still rallied - all because analysts expected JP to do even worse than they did!

Trying to trade stocks based on the assumption that "maybe this company won't do as bad as everyone thinks", is a sucker's game. The media creates headlines like this to get people to read their articles and watch their TV shows...fuck that!

Investors need to tune out and rely on their own experience and their own education to make money in this market.

Mr. Dimon pretty much said, "things aint gonna get better for a while now, so don't expect much from us." The CEO of a company says that and what I really hear is, "Hey, don't buy our stock right now, you can buy it later this year for much cheaper."

Education, not information my friend...play this bear market, don't let it play you!