TD Ameritrade Offers Social Research To Retail Clients

TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. AMTD will offer its retail online brokerage customers filtered access to comments on Twitter, the company said Monday.

Tracking social media sentiment and volume via Twitter can help discern trends as well as offer clues about a company's health and future prospects, Ameritrade said.

Aggregated comments via social media concerning individual stocks are already freely available via Yahoo Finance, the Nasdaq stock exchange portal and other Web sites.

But Ameritrade said its system provides selected recent tweets and measures the total number of English-language mentions on Twitter of individual companies in the past seven days.

The Ameritrade system also analyzes the percentage of positive tweets about a given company and its associated brands.

SwanPowers LLC is providing the system to Ameritrade for undisclosed terms.

SwanPowers is headed by Andy Swan, an Ameritrade employee from 2007 to 2014, who sold his social media website startup mytrade.com to Ameritrade.