After SEC Decision, Bloomberg Integrates Tweets Into the Wire

Wall Street operates at twitch-level speed, trading stocks on information the moment it comes in over the wire.

So it sorta makes sense that Bloomberg, one of the world’s largest providers of financial information, will soon incorporate Twitter, the real-time information service used by 200 million people around the world, into Bloomberg’s international information platform.

In other words: Day traders, prepare to see tweets showing up in your Bloomberg terminals.

“We recognize the rapidly growing importance of social media as a means for companies to release important, market-moving information,” said Karl Braasch, fund manager and co-founder of Bristlecone Capital Partners, in a release from Bloomberg. “It is extremely valuable to our business to be able to access this information on the Bloomberg Professional service in the same manner we use it for other market related applications and analytics.”

According to the release, Bloomberg will classify tweets into certain categories — by company, asset class, person and topic — making it more simple for traders to track up-to-the-minute information on a given market of interest. They’ll also be able to create alerts on a given subject, so if there’s an outburst of Twitter chatter on company X, a Bloomberg customer will be pinged ASAP.

Other Twitter feeds could include financial bloggers and economists, according to Brian Rooney, core products manager for news at Bloomberg, in an interview with the New York Times. (I’ll be waiting to see my tweets show up soon, guys!)

The news comes only days after the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that information made public on social networks by company executives will now be considered a fair and public disclosure, equal to reaching all of a company’s shareholders at the same time. (The decision stemmed from a Facebook status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last year; he disclosed subscriber numbers via the social network, and the SEC made an investigation into the matter, citing that Hastings did not file a simultaneous disclosure with the government agency.)

It also comes at a time where companies, news outlets and Wall Street are increasingly relying on information received outside the traditional news media, instead turning to social networks to receive the latest company chatter direct from the executive sources. So in order to adapt — and ultimately, not be usurped by social — Bloomberg is co-opting Twitter’s public feeds rather than ignoring them.

Smart move, methinks. Now, tweet on, CEOs.