Using StockTwits

How did i find out about StockTwits?

I knew nothing about twitter until i found StockTwits. I wanted to talk to other traders/investors and was desperately trying to find the right forum,blog or community, and nothing was striking my fancy until i came across StockTwits. When i found that this place had a streaming IM type of communication that was real time and talking about the subject i loved, heck were do i sign up? Heh, well apparently i have to get a twitter account in order to participate. So i signed up threw twitter and got into StockTwits. But when i was reading the “Tweets” i had no idea what some of the syntax was or how to even post. Well after trial and error and reading a bit on the net i found out how to. Some basic syntax is:

@

$

$$

The ‘@’ symbol followed by a user-name, will be a reference to a particular user with your message attached to it.

The ‘$’ is the most used and well known, it followed by a ticker symbol will display your tweet in the StockTwits view which usually you tweet this and ananalysis.

The ‘$$’ is used when you just want to be shown on the StockTwits interface without talking about a particular stock, but this message must be Finance related.

More on syntax here.

So what are some of the benefits of using StockTwits?

You can use StockTwits as a means of communication between others interested in the markets, or you can use it for some good information :) .

What i mean by information is, news alerts, stocks breaking out ect… This could be very useful since you cant keep your eyes on lots of stocks at one time, or if you are unfamiliar of the stock itself that just did not make your watch list. As everyone knows news can be hard to come by, especially if you don’t have some super high speed super expensive news alert subscription, but using StockTwits you will be able to capture that news fast because you have the fast majority of people on StockTwits wanting to be the first to announce the news. Why not just wait for all those tweets, that way you don’t have to do any work besides typing that ticker into your trading software and validate whatever is going on. ahh ha!

How not to use StockTwits.

Now there are some things you should keep in mind when using this service(which i should mention is free). A lot of people that use StockTwits are regular traders/investors and are not professionals or registered advisers. So any information or advice that you may read on the interface such as, Buy or Sell alerts should not be considered unless you yourself do your own due diligence and decide if you want to take action on that or not.

Also StockTwits should not be used as a place to promote your trades and spam the interface with pennystock alerts and so forth, StockTwits will contact you and warn you and eventually ban you, so don’t get into that.

Conlusion

StockTwits is entertaining and could be used as a tool, but always use your brain when reading some of that stuff. I will mention that there is an application out there that uses twitter and StockTwits in a nice and fancy setup, called the StockTwits desktop app, I on the other hand tried it and could never get into it, i just stick to the browser. So check out StockTwits for yourself and see what all the fuss is about.

you can follow me on StockTwits here.  :)