Trader’s Narrative

If you’ve been sharp you have already noticed that MarketWatch has a few new features out. For example, when you’re searching for information on their site they now have an Ajax enabled search which will give you suggestions on the fly. Exactly like my blog search function (top right). Go ahead, give it a try, type something and wait for a second, then scroll down the choices and click.

But that’s just eye-candy. The new feature that I’m really interested in is called MarketPerception. Its a little widget that comes up whenever you’re looking at information for any security on MarketWatch. Here is the widget for Apple:

After you vote, it presents you with the results and a few other pieces of information:

Clicking on more results will take you to a page where you can see what securities are being voted on the most and which have gotten the most extreme sentiment votes, either bullish or bearish. This is probably the most valuable way of looking at this new information.

Not only can you see which security is getting the most vociferous support but you can also see which is attracting the most attention from the lemmings out there. Right now there are very few votes, but this is still a very new feature. I’m also glad to notice that they only allow you vote once. This isn’t a totally scientific poll but every bit of attention to detail helps.

As you know, I really like finding little known ways of measuring sentiment. Here’s hoping this feature will grow up to become a nice contrary indicator.

If I were the owner of any social stock picking site I’d be a tad nervous. It seems that the management at MarketWatch ‘Get it’ and are slowly moving their considerable user base towards a social, interaction based model.