Hedge funds are going outside traditional media sources, monitoring influential financial commentators, including bloggers who have a strong social media presence.

Alacra, a data aggregator , monitors the opinions of 25,000 analysts by combing the web for their comments.

Alacra’s sources include such prominent bloggers as:

Barry Ritholtz – Ritholtz.com

Henry Blodget – Business Insider

Felix Salmon – Reuters

Fred Wilson – AVC.com

Howard Lindzon – HowardLindzon.com

Ken Doctor – Content Bridges

Michael Parekh – Michael Parekh on IT

Paul Kedrosky – Infectious Greed

Rafat Ali – Paid Content

Roger Ehrenberg – Information Arbitrage.

Interestingly, Alacra hones in on quotes to analyze sentiment, as it believes sentiment is more accurate than the entire blogger’s article.  So far, the data suggests that stock prices generally outperform when sentiment at a given company has been positive for a number of weeks.

‘The feedback has been good so far,’ says Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra. ‘The challenge is low frequency. There are fewer than 200 companies worldwide with enough data to make sentiment-based trading decisions.’

Alacra tries to differentiate itself from other data aggregators by monitoring only a select group of what it feels are influential sources on the web.

Alacra has its ear to the cloud, so to speak.