• VentureBeat, Monday, January 25, 2010 3:10 PM

StockTwits, which VentureBeat describes as "a sort of Motley Fool 2.0 for sharing investment information," has purchased financial news site Abnormal Returns. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The idea behind the acquisition is to fold the two services into one another -- along with stock charts startup chart.ly, which StockTwits bought last year -- into a real-time financial news hub.

Investor information about Abnormal Returns is apparently hard to come by, but VentureBeat says "It's presumed to be privately funded on the cheap by founder Tadas Viskanta." StockTwits was originally built entirely on top of Twitter, but late last year debuted a desktop version, and migrated to its own messaging platform. If they prefer, users can still post messages to StockTwits through Twitter.

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