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How To Use Twitter For Trading

Written By

James Barra

Written By

James Barra

James is an investment writer with a background in financial services. As a former management consultant, he has worked on major operational transformation programmes at prominent European banks. James authors, edits and fact-checks content for a series of investing websites.

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Edited By

Jemma Grist

Edited By

Jemma Grist

Jemma is a writer, editor and fact-checker focused on retail trading and investing. Jemma brings a unique perspective to the forex, stock, and cryptocurrency markets and works across several investment websites as a researcher and broker analyst.

» Jemma Grist Profile Page

Fact Checked By

William Berg

Fact Checked By

William Berg

William contributes to several investment websites, leveraging his experience as a consultant for IPOs in the Nordic market and background providing localization for forex trading software. William has worked as a writer and fact-checker for a long row of financial publications.

» William Berg Profile Page

Updated

Jul 10, 2024

Traders have long used Twitter to research market trends and gain insights into retail investors’ appetites. However, integrated TradingView charts and a partnership with the trading platform eToro, demonstrate the site’s ambition to become an investing hub. This tutorial explains how to use Twitter for trading, from accessing breaking news to the best trading accounts. We also unpack the pitfalls to avoid when trading with Twitter.

Trading on Twitter is risky due to fake news and misinformation.

Instead, consider brokers with social trading. These platforms allow users to interact and exchange ideas, similar to Twitter, but they are designed specifically for online trading.

From Politics To Trading

Early History

Twitter began its life in 2006 during a brainstorming meeting held by board members of a podcasting company, Odeo. The original idea came from Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student, who envisaged an SMS service that could be used to communicate with a small group of people.

In the following years, celebrities, politicians and many other public figures started tweeting and the site’s daily usage climbed from around 40,000 tweets a day in 2007 to 500 million in 2022.

Twitter’s profound influence has been seen in the political upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2007, as demonstrators used social networks to highlight abuses and organise anti-government protests.

Financial Twitter

But the site’s reach is not limited to politics, and communities have come up for almost any interest imaginable, including online trading.

Financial Twitter, or Fintwit, is the name for the global community who use Twitter to discuss all things finance, investment and trading related. The most-discussed Fintwit topics today can be found using Twitter’s hashtag (#) function or by searching through relevant trending topics.

A related Twitter community, Crypto Twitter, uses the social media site to discuss everything related to cryptocurrencies.

Crypto Twitter has been instrumental in generating the hype that has sent tokens to stratospheric price gains, as well as popularizing crypto-adjacent assets such as NFTs.

How To Use Twitter For Trading

With presidents, CEOs, billionaire business owners, day traders and finance scholars among the millions of users tweeting every day, Twitter offers some useful content for online traders.

The basics that traders can use to reach this content include:

• Hashtags – The classic Twitter tool for finding and following trending topics is the # symbol placed at the start of a word. Searching ‘#daytrading’ will bring up all the public tweets which include this hashtag, with the most influential tweets usually coming at the top of the feed. Hashtags also work as links, taking you to a list of tweets containing that hashtag when clicked on.
• Cashtags – A cashtag is a $ sign followed by a ticker symbol – $AAPL is the cashtag for Apple, for example. Search or click on a cashtag to reach all the tweets related to that asset.
• Integrated Apps – Twitter’s deals with TradingView and eToro are strides toward a more integrated approach to online trading. The former brings real-time price charts of popular financial assets, while the latter allows investors to view a larger range of charts, and click-through to the eToro platform to trade stocks and crypto.
• Explore Tab – Navigate to the ‘Explore’ tab to find the latest trending topics. You can search these by location or enter a hashtag, cashtag or keyword to look for specific trading topics.
• Advanced Search – Twitter’s advanced search function allows you to filter search results by a range of parameters, including date, engagement, language and more. It also allows you to search for tweets from specific accounts – useful for gauging whether a famous trader is worth following, among other things.
• Twitter Spaces – This social audio function allows Twitter users to have live conversations. It can bring together influential businessmen, politicians and experts to discuss the most important current topics spontaneously, making Twitter Spaces a feature to watch for trading tips.

Through these tools, Twitter can be used to help with trading in three main ways:

1. Following ‘Experts’ – Find knowledgeable traders, analysts, journalists and other experts and follow them. The more you engage with experts’ content, the more it will appear on your Twitter feed. Note, users will need to do due diligence to verify the quality and accuracy of information.
2. Researching Trends – Twitter offers numerous ways to gauge market sentiment and the mood among online traders. Following hashtags and checking replies to tweets about trading are simple ways to get a feel for market sentiment, but there are more sophisticated methods.
3. Reaching Breaking News – Twitter delivers breaking news, making it a useful tool for retail traders who need to react quickly to market events.

Following ‘Experts’

Before social media, retail traders were limited to the analysts on the television, print and radio sources available to them.

With Twitter, you can find and follow a much broader range of opinions, allowing you to hone in on analysis of the specific markets, assets or instruments you want to trade.

If your trades involve a specific country, region or currency pair, political analysts or journalists from the relevant countries could be useful sources for analysis.

Likewise, tech journalists, experts and academics can help you get a head start on the newest products or companies generating market buzz.

You may also find staff and even CEOs of companies you are interested in on Twitter, and following these can help you evaluate whether you want to invest or not.

Follow experts who offer insightful advice or have a unique perspective on one of your areas of interest and note the accounts they interact with for hints of who else to follow.

Some Twitter personalities are also quite responsive to questions from their followers – so you might be able to get their opinion on a topic of interest by tweeting at them or joining a Twitter Space they are involved with.

However, virtually anyone is free to post their opinion on a market – this does not necessarily make them a credible voice nor does it mean the content they post is accurate.

Best Trading Accounts

• @ElonMusk – The founder of Tesla and owner/CEO of Twitter has a track record of posting tweets that move markets – from crashing the price of Tesla in 2020 to pumping Bitcoin prices in 2021.
• @Business – Bloomberg’s Twitter handle says it all – this is all business news, delivered in real-time on the company’s feed to 9+ million followers. The feed also includes links to useful opinion pieces and analysis by Bloomberg contributors.
• @JimCramer – This day trading CNBC host is admired and derided in equal measure, but he is one of the most famous trading accounts on Twitter. Cramer is known for his off-the-wall, energetic performance on his ‘Mad Money’ show and for a decidedly spotty record on financial advice, but he has his finger on the pulse of hyped stocks.
• @Zerohedge – More than 1.6 million Twitter users follow this account for its alternative perspective on market news, which is also available on the Zero Hedge site.
• @PaulKrugman – This Nobel prize-winning economist tweets on a broad range of topics, and his thoughts on macroeconomic trends can provide useful insights.
• @PeterSchiff – With nearly a million followers, this Euro Pacific economist and author is one of the most influential accounts in the Twitter trading sphere.
• @cobie – A crypto trader who posts opinions and appraisals about news and trends from crypto markets and doesn’t shill coins; followed by around 750,000 people.
• @WSBMod – As the apparent moderator of the famous Wall Street Bets subreddit that sent GameStop and AMC stocks stratospheric in 2021, this is a popular account with traders interested in meme stocks.

Researching Trends

Twitter provides a place to research and follow trends thanks to its hashtag and cashtag functions and powerful search tools. These can help you gauge market sentiment about an asset, sector or region that you’re interested in.

Searching for keywords or hashtags will give you an idea of how popular a topic is, but it will also show you who is talking about it and what they are saying.

Some of the most significant trading events in recent years have been driven by trends on social media. The rise of meme stocks like GameStop in 2021 was a striking example of this, as were the huge gains made by popular crypto tokens such as Dogecoin, driven in large part by meme posts on Twitter.

But relevant trends don’t need to be specifically about trading. They could be about an upcoming vote or another anticipated news event that will have a knock-on effect on markets.

If you have a significant vote coming up, for example, Twitter can be useful for gauging the public mood and could help you plan trades that may be affected by the outcome.

Importantly, this is not a scientific method to forecast upcoming events, but it can be useful to traders alongside supplementary analysis and specialized trading tools.

Another benefit of using Twitter to research trends is the site’s integrated apps, including charts from TradingView and compatibility with eToro. Traders can navigate from Twitter to their eToro account to trade an asset with one click. Additionally, users of Twitter’s Android app can automatically access the TradingView chart of supported assets by clicking the cashtag.

Breaking News

It can take hours for stories on breaking news events to be published on traditional news outlets, but on Twitter as long as someone is present and tweeting, you can reach them instantly.

Famous occasions when a story broke on Twitter first include the Hudson River plane crash in 2009, the London G20 riots the same year, the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2010, and Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests.

Likewise, important announcements related to business often break first on Twitter, be it through a journalist tweeting from the scene of a negotiation or from an important figure tweeting themselves.

A good example of this came during the Brexit trade negotiations between the UK and EU, as political correspondents were usually the first source of news on the progress of talks, and they often tweeted their impressions before filing them in a news story.

This can be useful for day traders, as it could allow them to catch the beginning of a profitable trend or reversal early.

The flip side of this is that Twitter is also home to a great deal of misinformation – the notorious fake news – as well as popular accounts that may be tweeting sincere impressions but getting them wrong. Traders should practice caution and ensure they trust the source before acting on breaking news they find on Twitter.

How Not To Use Twitter For Trading

Like any other tool, Twitter needs to be used correctly to get any benefit. And using this social media site irresponsibly when making trades can be dangerous.

For every trustworthy expert or honest trader, there is at least one bot account or shill looking to promote a worthless stock or crypto.

Likewise, trending topics can be manipulated using botnets or other tools that generate large volumes of tweets.

Besides that, scams are frequently run through Twitter, often through fake accounts posting replies to popular trading personalities and sometimes through accounts posing as the personalities themselves!

You can protect yourself while trading on Twitter with the following precautions:

• Look Out For Bots – Bots are widespread on Twitter. You can usually identify them by scrolling through their tweets; large amounts of poorly written or copy-pasted text crammed with hashtags is a good sign of a bot. Additionally, accounts that follow many users but have few followers are also often fake. The ‘verified’ tag was once a good indicator of a trustworthy account, but it is less so now that any paying user can become verified.
• Avoid Self-Interested Accounts – Some influencers use Twitter to promote assets that they have a stake in. These ‘shills’ are particularly widespread in the crypto sphere, where the value of a token can make huge gains from a relatively small amount of investment, at which point the early buyers can dump their stake for a profit.
• Don’t Follow Trends Blindly – Just because something is trending on Twitter, it doesn’t mean there’s any serious interest in it in the real world. Botnets or relatively small but dedicated groups of real posters can be used to promote trending topics that have no concrete basis in reality. The best way to check is to research keywords or hashtags and check the nature of the posts.
• Only Click Trusted Links – With scammers and bots proliferating on Twitter, you should steer well clear of any links posted by an account you don’t trust. And never offer any personal information through a DM.
• Practice Risk Management – If you feel confident enough to make a trade based on the information you find on Twitter, make sure you employ adequate risk management measures. Even if a trend is driven by organic interest, not all meme stocks will take off like GME, and even some of the best analysts and experts get calls wrong. Ensure you are not staking too much on a single trade and use stop losses to limit what you can lose if things go south.

Alternatives To Trading With Twitter

If you’re looking for an alternative to trading on Twitter, you might think of one of the other popular social media sites, such as TikTok and Reddit. However, the best alternatives to using Twitter for trading are often available at online brokers.

Reputable trading firms such as CMC Markets and Pepperstone provide excellent resources, including news feeds, powerful trading platforms with charting tools, expert market analysis and educational resources.

Importantly, curated analysis content provided by these brokers cuts out some of the risks posed by unknown accounts on Twitter, and there will be far less random noise to deal with.

Additionally, you may become a better trader by making use of the educational content and grappling with all the analysis features on the trading platform. This in turn will help you recognise good (and bad) trading advice available on sites like Twitter.

Another option is social trading. These increasingly popular platforms allow beginners to replicate the trades of profitable investors. Brands, including CMC Markets and Pepperstone, also allow users to interact, swapping tips and insights, similar to Twitter. The key difference is that they are built and used solely for trading.

Trading Twitter (TWTR) Stock

As one of the world’s leading information networks with around 500 million tweets per day, Twitter has had an eventful life of its own on stock markets.

The company filed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013, climbing from an initial share price of around $40 to above $64 in January 2014 before plummeting to around $15 in 2015.

Twitter’s stock spiked to an all-time high above $76 in 2021 before falling to around $35 within months. A year later, billionaire and avid Twitter user Elon Musk bought the company for $43 billion, or $53 per share, ushering in a new era for the site as old staff and policies were replaced by those of Musk’s choosing.

With a huge outlay to recoup, Musk began tweaking and expanding the features offered by Twitter, and this included some exciting developments for traders, including charts from TradingView, a collaboration with Israeli online trading broker eToro, the prospect of cryptocurrency integration, and more. Ultimately, Musk’s vision is to turn Twitter into a “super app”.

Final Word On Trading With Twitter

Twitter is a popular social media site that offers opportunities to traders, but it does not come without risks. Twitter traders should strive to only follow trustworthy accounts and ignore self-interested influencers or bot-driven trends.

For many, the best practice is to rely on a broker for traditional trading purposes and to use Twitter as a supplementary news source and research tool.

FAQs

How Do You Use Twitter For Stock Trading?

You can use Twitter to look up the latest news about companies, sectors or geographical regions and learn about developments that might affect stock prices. You can also follow ‘experts’ to get their opinions about the latest market news and company reports.

But while Twitter can be a useful resource for retail investors, you should ensure that you are knowledgeable about stock trading before you make any trades based on information on Twitter.

Should Beginners Use Twitter For Trading?

It is possible for beginners to use Twitter to trade, but it isn’t advisable. There is a lot of misinformation floating around Twitter, and this could lead to poor trading decisions.

It would be better for a beginner to learn to trade on a demo account before making use of Twitter to inform their real-world trades.

Alternatively, copy trading allows novice investors to follow the strategies of profitable traders while also exchanging ideas and tips.

Who Should You Follow On Twitter For Day Trading?

To make the most of Twitter, follow famous traders in the assets and regions you are interested in. These may give you insights into short-term market movements that are useful for day trading.

Popular trading accounts on Twitter include @JimCramer (day trading CNBC host) and @PeterSchiff (Euro Pacific economist).

What Exchange Is Twitter Trading On?

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the company was traded on the NYSE. However, since Twitter became a private company, it is not traded on any exchange.

Why Is Twitter Not Trading On The Stock Market?

Twitter is a private company since Elon Musk’s buy-out in 2022, so you can no longer trade Twitter stock on any exchange.