On the crowded room: I've seen two communities that originally offered a lot of value in the early days completely get overrun within a two year timespan. I fear for StockTwits reaching this same point. However, the chance of that is lower because the value is in the relationships established–even if it turns into a noisy channel, I have about a dozen good voices I can turn to which will survive whatever happens. The relationships cross-cut the actual service itself and are portable.

But I've seen an uptick in spam followers recently (e.g., people who are following 8000, followed by 8000) who have almost no value to me. Following more than 400-500 or so is almost a guaranteed no-follow; their motives are elsewhere.

I think when a room gets crowed, the quality diminishes.

I hadn't really explored Covestor much until tonight and was pretty confused to see a penny stock trader like Timothy Sykes up 2000% in the last year at the top of the leader board. Then you find out he's trading with around a low-five-digit account, yet is pulling in $50K-$60K/month from his site, which ends up being about 10x his trading profits.

I'm one to believe that filtering the unwashed masses triumph in the end and that while Covestor removes the transactional and data-entry friction, it introduces a lot more psychological friction (in terms of linking your account, deciding to share your trades, etc.) But seeing a penny stock trader and chronic self-promoter winning over there falls into that “too good to be true” category that doesn't seem to do either Covestor or Sykes any good to have atop the leader board.

It will be interesting over the next year to see if StockTwits ends up as part of someone's walled garden, or if it stays true to the crowd-sourced roots and a series of related services spring up that are perhaps less “trusted” than Covestor, but maybe more practical and useful to the unwashed masses.

I don't bet against the internet, ever, and therefore I'm in the StockTwits camp for the long run. But if you truly believe that verifiability will be the determining factor for the winners, then no matter how much insight passes through StockTwits streams, it's going to be amateur hour compared to Covestor.

(What really intrigues me is what percentage of StockTwits users are on Covestor, and for the ones who aren't, what are the reasons why they're not?)

I suspect that sustained performance is difficult to find and achieve, and that who is relevant at any given point in time changes. If someone happen to catch market conditions where your skill is strong and you have a knack for self-promotion, then converting that luck into another revenue stream as the context changes out from underneath you is important. A permabear is useless during a bull market, but when the tide turns, they may be a great student of how things go bad and therefore may be much more important to listen to. Yet as the context changes, that voice that is now the loudest is far less relevant.

The question is how to find voices that fit the context that you might be investing in at any given point in time.

At the end of the day, it is perhaps more profitable to be a student drawing from the best of a variety of teachers (each relevant for a variety of contexts) than it is to be a teacher who might be tempted locked into a particular context and ideology. Agility triumphs over ideology.

As for eating your own cooking–great point. Cramer and the typical CNBC pundit would be far more credible if they were allowed to trade and tout all they want but only if they were willing to lay bare their entire trading history in return for this freedom.

Providing recommendations is easy. I can do that. The more difficult part is trading the same recommendations. Hence, eating your own cooking.

Trading is not difficult if you dedicate the time and willingness to learn.

There are plenty of free resources out there and plenty of mentors.