Guide to using Twitter for investment purposes
Twitter can be a great tool
I started using Twitter solely for investment purposes and send my first tweet on 10.12.2021. That was my portfolio back then. Look at it. It was pathetic. I even liked my own tweet. Looking at the travesty that was my portfolio back then puts into perspective how much I have developed as an investor since then and a lot of that development I attribute to using Twitter. Twitter has been amazing. I hear from a lot of people what a horrible toxic cesspool Twitter is and they are not wrong exactly. Twitter can be that place, but it can also be an amazing tool if you use it correctly. By correctly I mean how I use it. So I wrote this simple guide for investors using Twitter.
This guide is for people who want to use Twitter only as a platform to improve their investing knowledge and most importantly their investment returns. Most people use Twitter for different purposes and that’s fine I guess, but I think Twitter is best used as an extension of Yahoo Finance. Here are the rules I try to live by on Twitter.
Use “following” not for “for you”.
Always use “following” as your feed. “For you” presents you with absolutely horrific and very distracting content. “For you” is not for you. It distracts you and you don’t want to get lost on your investing path. You want to see only the tweets and re-tweets from the people you carefully decided to follow. “For you” is just absolutely horrific. Stay away from that place at all costs.
Be selective in your following decisions
I see many investors following thousands of accounts. That’s way too much. Get that number between 50-400 to get a nice flow of quality content. Your Twitter feed is an important due diligence tool for investors. Get a nice mix of different stuff on your feed: macro data, sector news, company news, DD, China flight stats, etc. If you follow thousands of people there is no way you carefully selected all of them and all of them provide something useful to your feed.
I have gotten the most value out of people who tweet about individual stocks they are invested in and are ready to engage with you about these investments. You want to extract knowledge from these people. There are many people who have expert-level knowledge about specific companies and they are willing to share it for free. Do not waste this opportunity. I have gotten many great ideas from investors on Twitter like this.
If you haven’t been selective purge your following list
Go through all of these accounts you follow and remove the people you don’t think bring you any value. There will be accounts that you just never bothered to unfollow.
You want to unfollow accounts that spam your feed with things unrelated to investing, but many great investing accounts also spam your feed with unrelated garbage. In these situations, you just have to do a simple Cost-Benefit analysis. Is their investment content good enough to compensate for your feed being vandalized sometimes? I just purged my following list and had to do this analysis with some accounts. Some survived, and some were not so lucky.
There is one thing you can do to alleviate this problem.
Silence undesirable words
Above are pictures of some of the words I have silenced. Tweets with these words will not litter my feed any longer and trust me there are more words in this list. Usually, these are trending controversial topics that people just can’t shut up about. Personally, I don’t want to hear the V word, K word, or the G word. I’m sick of hearing about these things. Do the same and clean your feed from topics that provide no value for you and only serve to annoy you.
Silence and block with a swift hand
When there is an annoying account that keeps showing up in your feed just immediately remove that account from your reality. Same thing with trolls or people who refuse to discuss in good faith. Most of this guide is about creating an optimal Twitter environment for you so you can focus on what matters. Getting rid of all the BS. With a platform that is 99% useless content, the rule is exclude, exclude, exclude.
Keep your tweets and retweets investing focused
You are here for investing purposes. Keep your tweets and retweets in line with that purpose. You want followers who are interested in investing. Don’t alienate them by spamming them with your political opinions. Don’t annoy them by posting pictures of your food. You will only make them jealous and hungry. There is this urge sometimes to tweet something not investing-related. Resist this urge.
Do not get into political debates
When I started using Twitter sometimes I had debates about politics that lasted for hours and they never amounted to anything. I don’t think I or the other person ever changed our views or came to any sort of conclusion. Do not waste your time with this. Resist the urge to correct someone when they say something that seems just beyond stupid to you. The only useful debates or discussions I have had are about specific stocks and sectors. Sometimes politics intersects with investing, but I have noticed the more you go from the micro to macro the less likely you will have a good debate or discussion. The more we go into macro the more we move away from facts and move toward politics, values, opinions, emotions, and theories.
Example: A discussion about a specific company will be usually good. Discussion about the sector the company is in will be usually decent. Discussion about how macro events will impact this company will be usually a waste of time.
Ask questions
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.” – China
There is really no downside to just asking a lot of questions. You are here to get better at investing. Not to pretend you are already a genius investor. As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of smart investors willing to share their knowledge for free. If you have a question for someone just send a DM. You would be surprised how many people are willing to give you detailed and lengthy answers to your questions. Even people with very high follower counts who you would think would ignore most DMs.
Don’t overthink your tweets and engage in replies
Point is to learn and engage with other investors. Just put stuff out there and engage. I see many people writing these detailed threads and then they are not even taking the discussion further in the replies. I don’t really see the point in that. You are just telling them what you already think and just leaving it there. Not much learning happening there. Expose your investment theses to scrutiny to see if they hold up.
conclusion
There it is. My first guide. Twitter has been the best investment research platform I have used and I want to keep it that way so I try to follow these rules when I use Twitter to keep it from becoming just another social media site where the purpose is just to get a dopamine hit.
Solid advice, but its missing one important bit. If you are on desktop and not mobile, i would say it is MANDATORY to use tweetdeck. It blows the basic fintwit experience out of the water. Try it.