TradingView is an online community for active traders, offering an excellent and free web-based charting solution. StockTwits is a financial communications platform for the investing community, sort of a Twitter-like platform exclusively for financials. They have partnered with each other, allowing their members to repost TradingView’s ideas to their StockTwits profiles automatically. But here’s why I believe the integration isn’t flawless.
I have been a member and a big fan of both services. I have even talked with both companies’ CEOs, privately and publicly. Both TradingView and StockTwits are exceptional tools for traders worldwide. Apart from their main offerings, they can be used in multiple ways. For instance, StockTwits can be used as a stock scanner.
TradingView’s top notch charts and social integration, on the other hand, could also teach iGaming companies a lesson. In the past, I have advised Betfair exchange to partner with TradingView or at least, build a similar service. The potential is truly phenomenal in the online gaming world. This is a pretty self-explaining image:
What if sports charts looked line stock charts?
Back to the main point of this article, let me explain how TradingView and StockTwits integration works.
Say you think a company’s stock price is about to rise. You load the stock chart to your TradingView’s screen, draw some lines and indicators and you are ready to share your idea. For best results, you pick a cheesy title and add a short description, describing your analysis. Surely, you could publish a chart without any text. Yet, when was it the last time you posted a photo to Facebook or Twitter with a few words next to it?
Here is a recent example of my prediction on Chesapeake energy’s stock.
Upon sharing an idea to TradingView, there’s an option to auto-repost to StockTwits, given you have connected your TradingView’s account to your StockTwits profile. Although a gone-wrong prediction (I have posted many of those, Murphy’s Law imply your publicly shared picks will always perform worse than expected), the point here is how this analysis was reposted to my StockTwits profile.
StockTwits imposes a character limitation to the posts, similar to Twitter. That’s pretty understandable. But here, the post is cut absurdly. Despite the descriptive title and the attached chart, I’d rather readers had the opportunity to read the rest of the analysis.
Wait, there’s a shortened link at the post’s end. Doesn’t that link steer readers to the original idea at TradingView?
Unfortunately, no. It points back to the StockTwits message! Not much helpful, is it?
Instead, I’d recommend StockTwits to incorporate a backlink to the original TradingView’s idea. Yes, that would lead people to leave StockTwits. But let’s not forget that readers had originally found the idea at StockTwits, which means they should already be active StockTwits members. No harm in directing your loyal users to another valuable financial website.
By doing so, my StockTwits followers will have a chance to read my prediction in full, should they find my initial StockTwits shortened idea interesting, and why not, follow me at TradingView as well. And instead of adding yet another shortened link, leading to more butchering of the original message, why not using the already attached link? Just my two cents.
I first brought up the issue at Twitter, giving a shout to TradingView, responding that they “can’t post links to StockTwits”.
Shout to @tradingview to fix @StockTwits integration. Autoshare must link to original chart or analysis is incomplete http://t.co/DuQJBLdXWS
— Jim Makos (@JimMakosCom) February 27, 2015
StockTwits jumped in and contacted me publicly as well. Hopefully, we can work something out! I’ll keep you posted.
