Twitter has long been a place for stock and crypto enthusiasts to discuss financial markets. The tweet volume related to stocks was enough back in 2012 that Twitter decided to introduce cashtags (stock tickers starting with "$" sign) separate from regular hashtags.
Unfortunately, that's about as far as the cashtag innovation at Twitter has extended. Sure, the cashtag links are clickable and some of them you can even follow now...but their function remains similar to those of hashtags. That is, when you click a stock or crypto cashtag, it becomes a search query, displaying all recent tweets which include that specific cashtags.
While there is utility in the search functionality, the Financial Twitter (Fin-Twit) has graduated far past that use case. Most users regularly request new functionality to be built into Twitter cashtags to allow for a richer experience:
While fin-twit users suffer at the hands of Twitter's lack of innovation in this area, many people have taken it upon themselves to remedy this situation, including myself.
With the goal of democratizing financial information on Twitter, I created a free chrome extension (Ticksy) which shows real time price data for all US stocks and all major crypto, when you hover over their ticker cashtags:
Social finance tools are absolutely needed on a global platform like Twitter today. While there have always been communities like StockTwits, they don't enjoy the full network utility of platforms like Twitter where stock or crypto discussion is blended into any number of other discussions by Twitter users.
And while StockTwits, be credited with creating "Cashtags," as their founder pointed out, the social platform had been quite stagnant in terms of growth for the last few years. That is until recently, due to covid, they saw an uptick in user growth, by 50%, which prompted their most recent $30M fundraise at $210M valuation. All pointing towards the fact that market has a clear need for a social product which combines the finance and social media side of things. Why won't Twitter buy them and integrate them into their own platform? That remains a big mystery.
But until that becomes a reality and Twitter decides to serve its massive crypto and finance communities, Indie makers like myself will keep building solutions in hope of bridging the gap!
Tweet at me @hassanshaikh0 to suggest any feature suggestions or simply the extension with other Twitter users!
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