Recently, I wrote an article about the Redditors, Robinhood, and the impact on commodity firms. I also participated in a Commodities People webinar on the same topic. My thinking was that this new trend of retail investors driven by Reddit groups and social media would have a limited direct impact on commodities outside of perhaps a bit of added volatility from time-to-time as we saw in Silver – and who knows if it really was the retail investors as rumors soon circulated of hedge funds being behind the silver push using the Redditors as cover….. The other area I saw some possible impact was in the area of taking trade signals from social media tools and software. Something we saw a lot of promotion of a few years ago but didn’t seem to take off in a big way in commodities.
However, recently we saw a new impact of this activity. The activities of the retail inventors led by social media and utilizing platforms like Robinhood have had an unexpected impact on CTRM after all. When the Redditors identified a small company for its focused activity with the stock symbol ‘CTRM’, Google also picked up on the sudden extra interest in that search term and seems to have adjusted its engine accordingly. Whereas before, searching on ‘CTRM’ brought up a whole list of CTRM players headed by this site, it now brings up news about a small stock – Castor Maritime Inc. (CTRM). In February, it became a focus of the Redditors and its stock price changed suddenly. Google responded by changing the way it deals with ‘CTRM’ as a search term. A ‘CTRM’ search no longer brings up useful information about the CTRM software industry, but now displays stocks and shares applications with recycled Castor Maritime Inc. (CTRM) share information.
The removal of ‘CTRM’ as a Google search term now results in reduced exposure for the CTRM industry’s users and buyers, and will greatly increase confusion and frustrations. No longer are searchers going to find CTRM software results but instead, they will find out about this very small company and its stock price. Thank you Redditors!
Meanwhile, having spotted this, CTRMcenter has taken steps to become more relevant in the way that Google now looks at the search term. However, for those of us that see the importance in ranking on the Google search engine for such terms, perhaps writing to Google would be a good idea?
