The Twitter-24/7 Wall St. Market Report 11/15/2010 Caterpillar M&A, Retail Sales Surge

Twitter  has, by most estimates, 145 million members, which makes it one of the largest social networks in the world. All major media companies are on Twitter and some have more than one million Twitter users. It raises the question of whether there is wisdom in crowds.

24/7 Wall St. will look at the Twitter posts at Reuters Biz, WSJ, Financial Times, CNN Money, MarketWatch, CNBC, and 24/7 Wall St. each day to see which stocks are most frequently mentioned. It is clear that in this area of social media these tweets are a sign of which companies the Twitter universe is interested in. Together, these financial sites are followed by nearly 1,000,000 Twitter users, which makes them a sizeable sample of Wall St.’s interests. In some cases, we will publish the actual tweets from the sites

CNN Money: Retail sales in October increased 1.2% over the prior month, the government says. The rise is much better than expected. $$

WSJ: Deal Journal: Evening Reading: SEC Probing Philip Falcone; China Wants In on GM IPO http://bit.ly/agpclv

MarketWatch: Fed’s gauge of the New York-region business climate plunges to negative-11.1 reading http://on.mktw.net/bmKI3T

Reuters: Republican group to urge Fed to drop QE2: report http://dlvr.it/8ZBlW

Reuters: Caterpillar buys Bucyrus to double down on mining http://dlvr.it/8Z97c

MarketWatch: U.S. retail sales climb 1.2% in October — fourth straight monthly risehttp://on.mktw.net/9WSsSQ

MarketWatch: Caterpillar to pay $7.6 billion cash in buyout of mining-equipment manufacturer Bucyrus http://on.mktw.net/bUSIPC

Yahoo! Finance: BHP kills Potash Corp bid, revives $4.2 billion buybackhttp://yhoo.it/b2ipCS

DailyFinance: Caterpillar to Buy Bucyrus in $8.6 Billion Deal http://aol.it/9hEsbd

Douglas A. McIntyre