what do you guys all think about posting trades on twitter? I have been posting mine on Twitter, not sure to what purpose, but would welcome your thoughts. https://twitter.com/JBSTrades
Generally discretionary trading, focusing on SPY and other liquid stocks. As it relates to entries and exits, it's a combination of using TA and managing my risk. Also I will structure the trade based on my expectation of price movement and where possible on IV. This gives me some leeway in misjudging price action. I'm not a big precise chart guy. So I do all my analysis before hand and try to move with the ebbs and flows of the market. With each trade I start with the assumption that I will be wrong and go from there. I know all this sounds a bit without structure, but after studying myself and my sweet spots, I have found this to work for me. I guess the question is if I can stay consistent. It's been a quarter running this based on this premise and so far results are promising. I started the year at 100k and currently sitting at 200k. Cheers
Twitter and Stocktwits only allow a small number of characters (140 per message) and most liquid trading instruments are "very active" in messages by traders. I think this is a key to its popularity. Traders are forced to get to the point via the 140 character limit per post. Simply, its and excellent format for trade posting (real-money or simulator) because the message post are so small that a trader really can't go into any trade strategy in-depth details except to just make quick/fast commentary. Regardless if someone is using twitter and stocktwits for posting trades, general market discussions or for anything else related to trading...its a very useful resource for communication. Yet, if you want to get into any actual detailed strategy discussion, one would need to use a different online communication format (e.g. forum, email, blog). I also like how easy it is to self moderate my twitter/stocktwits feeds. I can easily put the trolls on ignore and then follow those I want to hear from. Further, I can often get faster real-time news before it hits the major financial networks especially breaking news. Also, about two years ago I was wondering about the "usefulness" of twitter and stocktwits until I saw a real-time interview on the exchange floor and two of the floor traders made a commentary about their use of twitter to communicate to other traders within their network...they were doing such on their hand held devices. Simply, the pros using it too as further confirmed by a few of my personal friends in Europe and Canada that are institutional traders although they aren't using if for posting trades. Trade posting seems to be something exclusive to retail traders only. Twitter and stocktwits are mobile too. Thus, when not trading and away from home/work or outside...very easy to keep up with what's going on in the market on just about anything of interest. I also use twitter for personal use as a communication tool. I'm have a few serious hobbies and twitter is the best tool for keeping up to dates with what's going on. Just don't mix trading with personal info. Thus, get two different user names...one for trading and one for personal use on twitter especially with several good third party software to manage both simultaneously.
Definitely think the 140 character limit creates certain dynamics that both promote more participation and also what types of posts are of value. I notice that most people who do post trades are discriminating in what they post and generally only posting winners in hopes of drumming up interest for their subscription service. It seems to me that there would be no reason for non-retail traders to post anything, as in a sense they've "already made it." I am currently trading in the "start-up" stage in what I hope to turn into a fund. I was thinking that if I maintain of real-time record of my trades, prospective investors in the future can reference it and determine if the fund would be suitable for them. Admittedly, one of my working assumptions is that I will only be trading with my own money as it is difficult to get to scale needed to justify for all the costs of running a fund. The end goal is sort of a pie in the sky right now. Family and friends around me have expressed interest in having me manage their money, but just don't have the infrastructure in place to execute my style of trading and have the money not all in one account. Definitely agree here. In fact, I have separate accounts to post commentary about the markets and an account dedicated to just posting trades. I will probably continue to post trades and weekly summaries and see how it goes. Thanks again for your insights, very helpful. Cheers
A PAMM shouldn't be too expensive to start up. A hedge fund business on the other hand is very pricey. The legal fees alone would disuade anybody who hasn't raised several mill. from launching such a startup.
PAMM is some kind of percent allocation? With how I trade and only trading options, I find it to be difficult to do multiple accounts and a % allocation. A lot of times I get partial fills and fills with lots of different prices. Thanks for the idea.
I certainly agree with the comment above about Twitter being a valuable resource for real-time news. For traders looking to trade based on recent news releases, updates, and so on, Twitter can be really valuable for that and to keep a general eye on the market.
To be specific, there's no reason for "non-retail" traders to post trades and probably because they would be violating compliance rules at their jobs (e.g. institutional trader). In contrast, as I said before, non-retail traders like floor traders, institutional traders do use twitter to communicate with others within their network. Simply, they're talking about other market issues (e.g. news) instead of posting trades on a public network like twitter although there are ways to have private conversations on twitter. In contrast, retail traders can find twitter very useful and we don't need to post trades to achieve that usefulness. However, if you're trying to start a fund or something and use twitter to expand your network of contacts...trade posting won't be a negative. Yet, reality is that you're going to need to do a lot more beyond posting trades on twitter if managing a fund is your true goal especially with the fact that there are already fund managers hanging out on twitter although not posting trades via the reason I already discussed above. My point is you probably might want to put most of your efforts into setting up your business first and just quietly grow your trading account assuming these are real-money trades. If these are not real-money trades...hypothetical trade posting on twitter/stocktwits or whatever will not get you were you want to go in reference to being a fund manager. P.S. Have you researched the "typical" background (e.g education, network, trading experience) of the type of fund manager you want to be ? If you know that answer...I strongly suspect that trade posting on twitter wasn't how they got started.