How To Use Twitter For Trading

Hello, it's Anthony Cheung here from Amplify Trading in London, and due to, I would say, popular demand, I've been asked to do a lecture or a conversation about how I use Twitter for the benefit of trading and monitoring the news. Now, it's a question I get asked a lot from a number of different people, all the way from kind of institutional level traders, desks, bond desks, FX desks, hedge funds, down to retail traders. Everyone kind of wants to know what's the kind of secret sauce that I use for monitoring Twitter. And, and really, once I go through this session, it's very much a case of a logical and quite a structured process in how to use that tool effectively to get the most out of it. And so there's a couple things I can go over and explore and share with you. I think I've been using Twitter now for the best part of perhaps 8, 9 years, always until more recently joining Amplify, just for the purpose of monitoring. Now obviously I tweet a little bit more myself. A little bit about my background. I'm the head of market analysis here at Amplify Trading. I was in the same position previously for a company called Ransquawk, which is one of the world's leading squawk companies. My job then is to monitor financial news and give insight analysis in a real-time fashion upon things of which I'm seeing. So that can be things that are coming out off of traditional newswires like your normal terminal systems, or can be things like Twitter, for example, where you can capture things like rumors and so on, which we're going to discuss. So that's what we're going to talk about. And going straight into things, why do we use Twitter? Now, now let's just build the scene first of why exactly use Twitter when you can use a Bloomberg or Reuters, these kind of professional systems which people will pay thousands and thousands of dollars for every month. Now, the point being here is that the guys at the big institutions will be using those platforms. But, you know, those who are not familiar with it, Bloomberg's news function is just one small part of that, that terminal. I mean, it's quite a powerful tool in terms of its analytics, its historical data sets that you can look at, as well as things like a chat function, pricing functions, and so on and so forth. The point being is, let's say Bloomberg has around 3,000 financial journalists worldwide, and they're releasing these news stories all the time. Reuters might be doing the same, Wall Street Journal, the FT. These are your traditional financial news services. Now, one of the restrictions that they can have is that they can only really report authenticated and genuine news, which means then by default they can be quite slow on certain things. For example, What I've tried to do here is give you a kind of overview of why Twitter can kind of fill that gap and how it does so. First of all, speed. Now, one of the things here, and it kind of fits in lockstep really with the one on the right, which is rumors. Let's say Brexit has been a massive issue ever since it was initiated in the summer of 2016, and every time we get these kind of roadmaps of when there's a political event that's happening, like a vote in Parliament for example, you see this big spike in traffic, and the pound becomes much more sensitive to movement and responsive to headlines when they come out. Now, one of the things there is, is that these journalists— and if you think about a journalist by default, what is their singular objective as a journalist? Now, what they want is basically to break stories first. If the guy at BBC or can beat the girl at the ITV or Channel 4 and so on, they become much more famous for that, they become much more well followed, more respected. It's kind of the first out with the scoop is the king in that world. And the new format of delivering that, now that news dissemination has evolved so much over the period of the last decade, is Twitter. So I remember when I started in markets in 2006, literally you had to wait for the truck drop-off to pick up your newspapers fresh in the morning and read them, and then to find what was the important headline of the day. Markets would then open and react. But markets in 2020 now move radically different. Now it's a case of as soon as Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, says something, a journalist is on it and tweets it immediately. And financial news now, in a way of which prices or trades are executed, it's not just humans point-click anymore. There's algorithms, there's other systems automated that can respond to these types of keywords, for example. And that means then the underlying story now is almost redundant. What actually moves markets in a very short-term intraday environment is a piece of news. A headline comes out and the market spikes and so on. So speed is critical. The ability for Twitter, um, being unauthenticated in a way means that it can circumvent the restrictions of the editorial sign-off process, meaning that news comes rapid. Now obviously one of the key things which we can we'll discuss later is also authenticity is key. How do you know what you're seeing is genuine is one of the things you'll need to tackle when using Twitter. But what it does offer is great access to speed and rumors. So with that Brexit example I was suggesting, when there's whispers in the halls of Westminster, you're going to hear it directly from your Laura Koonsbergs, your Robert Pestons, your Paul Brandes from ITV, for example, they will be tweeting it way before then it becomes on the 6 o'clock news, for example. The other thing that Twitter is so good is accessibility. That's why I've put access there, is the idea that you can just have this on your mobile. So when you're going about your business, when you're— for me, I'm on the commute into the City of London every morning. I can just jump on my phone, I can look at who I follow, because who I follow is a curated feed of bespoke individuals, hand-picked, that talk about the things that are relevant for me. Now for me, I monitor global macro, so I'm looking out for people commenting on these big top-level things like the trade war, or Brexit, and Trump, and so on. Now by the time I can say that I get into the office, which is about 20 minutes on the train, then I'm pretty much ready to go. I haven't looked at a Bloomberg, I've not looked at Reuters, I've not even looked at the charts and I already pretty much know what they're going to look like. That's how powerful it can become and certainly if you're a student perhaps watching this video, what a great way to be able to just learn on the fly between lectures, between traveling on a train or on the bus. It's a great way where you don't have to go through that arduous process of reading the FT back to you know, back to back, cover to cover. It's just a case of you're seeing every tweet is adding value to your understanding and your awareness of what's going on in the market in a real-time sense. And the other thing then, that as I've described, as to the knowledge, the accumulation of knowledge, and that's one of the things where for me, someone, if you watch our morning briefings that we deliver on our YouTube channel, do subscribe to them because they'll really help enhance your fundamental understanding of the market. So the overall global macro approach that we have here at Amplify Trading. But people often look at me and go, you know, why do you know about, you know, labor strikes in South Africa and how that impacts, say, platinum prices? But then how do you know about the copper mines in Chile, in Escondida? But then what, how do you know about UK politics? Now these things aren't, you know, I haven't just magicked them up out of thin air. I know these things through having gone through years of experience, and Twitter definitely helps accelerate that, that kind of knowledge bank that I think you need to be an effective global macro trader or to have an enhanced understanding of market fundamentals. But bear in mind, I have been doing this since, you know, 2006. So my ability to maintain and absorb information has certainly been improved by the way I've been trained and developed over time. A few other things then here. One of the things I wanted to show you was this, and some of you may be familiar with this. It's a story I often tell because it's one that resonates for me very clearly in my mind because I remember the day very vividly. So I used to run, as I said, a real-time news and analysis service. So my clients were these guys who were trading large size in the market, and they were paying us for real-time coverage. Now, this was back in 2012, I think, was when I first started to table the idea to my colleagues about we should be looking at Twitter more, with more focus. We should have a designated person looking at Twitter full-time with a kind of full-screen setup, all organized into monitoring different things. Because what I had, I had seen through kind of backtesting was that over the course of 12 months, it was yielding very good results for finding things from rumors about single stock information to potential terrorism alerts. There things like that. It was coming way before traditional newswires. So we got the go-ahead and we had a chap sat there and he was— his job was to just look at Twitter. Now arguably back then there wasn't anywhere near as much activity perhaps or quality as there is today in 2019, 2020, but there were elements of— you could see where this was going. And what happened in mid- April 2013, you might remember, is when those two brothers conducted that horrific Boston Marathon bombing. And what typically happens after a high terrorist event of that nature is that global terrorist statuses kind of go on high alert. And literally just a week later, we had this tweet. I know it's a bit small to see, but let me read it out so you. This was the Associated Press, AP News. They basically tweeted, "Breaking news: 2 explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured." This was the genuine Associated Press Twitter account. It has around 11 million-odd followers. So this was legit as far as we could see it. So we obviously reported the information, but the beauty of this was is that not everyone was looking at Twitter at the time. And obviously we had a designated guy who was just there looking at Twitter, and he immediately was able to comment on this and capture what you can see here, which was an immediate spike in US equities to the downside. And then what transpired in this event was actually the Associated Press— it was the actual account, but it had been hacked and By hacking it, then they had put out an illegitimate tweet. The tweet got removed, the market reversed, but I remember it quite clearly. It was several minutes before Bloomberg even mentioned this piece of news. They were so far behind the curve, it was unreal. Now, for our clients at the time when I was in my previous job, it was a, it was a great opportunity to trade if you were an aggressive type of trader and you're willing to commit get into the market and that type of volatility, then you had a massive time arbitrage to be able to execute those trades. And, um, what happened here though was because of this one singular event, Twitter then became no longer this kind of thing that a few people looked at to an absolute common mainstay of a setup of nearly every proprietary trader in the world. If you if you were looking at trading intraday in that fashion. One of the big things then that gets asked then is credibility of these news sources. So people like Bloomberg, Reuters, FT, BBC, and so on, all the national newspapers, most of those journalists are in fact encouraged to tweet. Now don't get me wrong, people like Bloomberg are not going to release the scoop on Twitter because that would be counter to the whole reason that people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a Bloomberg terminal. But things like Times Telegraph definitely can offer some insight because other than just the, a publication every once in a while, perhaps on a weekly basis in the weekend press, journalists can be quite active throughout the day. So definitely these are good sources of credible information. Less credible ones then: Twitter, blog sites. Another blog site, a very infamous one you might be aware of in the financial community, is one called Zero Hedge. Now, Zero Hedge, I think their work is absolute quality. Obviously, you need to take it a little bit with an awareness of their overall kind of spin on markets being somewhat, you know, sensationalist or quite bearish, but ultimately they're putting out some really insightful information. Information from different banknotes, from different economists, analysts, things that otherwise from a retail trader's point of view could be quite difficult to get your hands on, and also helps give you quite a high level, uh, an intellectual level of looking at how markets are viewed by seasoned professionals. How to verify then a Twitter account, and this is the kind of checklist that generally I would go through in order to have that process of can I trust and rely on what this Twitter account is saying. And here you've got who do they work for, how many followers do they have, have they— has the account been officially verified as per the logo you can see on the right-hand side, what type of content has been tweeted previously, Who follows the account in question? And what is the context of the tweet? Now, one of the things I wanted to show you to put this checklist almost into action is this. Some of you might remember this, certainly if you're watching in the UK, you probably will. But, you know, this was December of 2016, I think it was. And I remember it because We have a bit of a shutdown here at AmplifyTrading between Christmas and New Year, so I was hanging out with some friends. It was shortly after Christmas, so I wasn't in the office, but markets were open, and I get this frantic phone call off one of my former colleagues, and he's going, "Anthony, Anthony, the Queen is dead! I'm going to short the pound! How much should I short the pound?" And I was kind of like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, just hold on, hold on a second, why would you want to short the pound? Was my first question. You know, quite frankly, if the Queen is dead, that's not going to have any impact on the pound, was my initial view. And he was arguing that, yeah, but consumer confidence will be hit and spending will be down. And I was like, look, you're talking way too small a value and too long a period of time for traders to be hitting that in an intraday kind of move, so I wouldn't even worry about it. He puts the phone down. I then go on my phone, I go on Twitter, and I just type in "the Queen is dead" to see what is happening. Now stay with me, this is a genuine example. So I find this tweet. This was actually the tweet that I found. Now let me talk you through two things. One is what is wrong with this Twitter account? What to you, looking at it, makes you think there's something not quite right about it? So let me walk you through it. For one, they're following 225 accounts, and two, they've got just over 1,000 followers. So remember, this is trying to suggest that this is the main BBC News UK Twitter account. And it's got 1,000 followers. That to me is alarm bells immediately. The other thing is they've made a typo. They've put UK with a lowercase k. They've also got an, a random i after the UK in the actual handle of the account. And the context of the tweets— if you actually looked at the context of the tweets, although you can see this really high-res image of the Queen with a very legitimate-sounding title. The other tweets were of this person's dog, what they had for breakfast. So it was immediately obvious to me that this was, this was fake. Now, how you can kind of read between the lines here and eliminate this type of illegitimate news is people were literally— no one was clicking on the profile. All that was happening was the tweet in itself. So if you were just to imagine the bottom half of this page, there were a whole load of people just resharing, retweet, retweet, retweet. And so when you look at it, it's almost validated that it's genuine by the fact that it was getting thousands of retweets per second. So it had gone like wildfire and people just took it for what it was, that it was genuine. So this is where, again, a little bit of understanding of knowing when markets can be manipulated by these types of things, but then also having the foresight to be able to verify the account, not believe just what you're seeing. It's kind of one of those things like when I talk to our traders about data, for example, never take a piece of data in isolation. You've got to put it into context because otherwise it can be misleading if it's just a singular piece of information. And it's the same thing here with Twitter. So again, all I did then to carry that and conclude the story is I just basically said, "The Queen's not dead, this is a fake account." And as you can see here, I woke up the next morning, on the morning of the 30th of December, and I was literally the front page of every national newspaper in the world— The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Sun newspaper, the most widely read newspaper in Britain. And this wasn't because, you know, I'm anyone particularly unique, and how this is transferable to trading is that, you know, I've seen the head of the German Bundesbank's Twitter account falsified and someone's tried to tweet to move the market. And in fact, In fact, it did move the euro. This is one important thing to be aware of. Just because it's fake, if enough people believe it, it can move the market. The idea then is about the longevity you'd want to be in a position of risk in a trade on the back of that type of information. What happened with the Bundesbank one was that the actual central bank had to come out and issue a formal press statement to say that that was not actually them. It was a made-up hoax account. So hopefully that makes a little bit more sense about the authenticity process of this. This is pretty much the most important slide that I'm going to share with you, and this is my, my process. How do I find the best people to follow on Twitter? And these are my kind of key bullet points that I've spent many years kind of refining. And so I'm gonna share them with you, and hopefully you can learn to develop this into a really powerful tool for yourself. So, 1: Explore your community. Now, what I mean by this is when you— when I follow someone on Twitter, let's say there's a guy called James Smith. He's one of the developed FX market strategists at a European bank. I think his work is very good, I really like his analysis, I think he's right on point. So what I will do is I will find him on Twitter and I will follow him. That's great, that's step 1. Step 2 then is, if he works at a big financial institution, he is very much on point, he's got his finger on the pulse, and he provides timely and useful information for me, my question then is, when I go on his Twitter account, Who does he follow? Who does he feel is good enough to make his shortlist of the people he would want to follow? And then I start unlocking this kind of spider's web of who's connected to who, and then who— people who I'd never even heard of start blipping up on the radar, and I start looking at the context of their tweets, and they're tweeting useful information all of the time. So Who's connected to who in your network is a real important one. It's kind of the number one step that I would take. The other thing then is you're obviously going to start following quite a few people, so you've got to get organized. Now I'm going to share with you a free service called TweetDeck, which allows you to organize them by columns into structures in different lists. So basically you categorize who you're following. To make it much more orderly so you can, you can look at it and utilize it more effectively. So creating lists is quite, quite key. A common question I get is how many Twitter accounts can you follow in, say, one list? I would say maximum you want to do is about 450, 500. I think if you go beyond that, then TweetDeck, which streams these tweets in real time, gets too fast. And so that's about optimum. I'd say if you're more experienced and you can manage looking at more things, then perhaps you can go a little higher. But then I think it's about then breaking it up into more subject areas rather than having one list with everything. That's quite hard to manage. So how we used to do it was that each column had a specific purpose. One might be the transportation hubs within central London to identify if there are any terror alerts. So or suspect packages and so on. Another might be people explicitly commenting on US stocks. Another one might be someone talking specifically about FTSE companies. So these are all how you would organize it. Understand what type of news you are looking for. You know, one thing again to be crystal clear, you're not using Twitter to capture, say, economic data when it's released. You know, that's where you go to Investing.com or Forex Factory. You can get that anywhere. What you're looking for are rumors. That's what's really powerful when it comes to Twitter. Now, with rumors, things like Brexit again would be a perfect one. When you know that there's a big meeting, or let's say the China-US trade war, there's a phase 1 meeting, a signing happening at X time, when do you think potential rumors might occur? Without surprise, they occur right in the build-up and run-up to the meeting. Not a week before, but a day before. Kind of the same thing can happen with central bank sources. So when Bloomberg release something like an ECB source comment, which is basically an informed person with close thinking of the central bank, they will drop that in usually in the 24, 48 hours before the event in itself. That's when the market is most susceptible to that type of information. So again, I know kind of just through experience when I need to look for Twitter and when rumors might occur. So say with economic data, yes, I'm not looking for the release, but if there was going to be a leak of data, for example, like ISM, ADP, non-farm payrolls, if it is gonna come, it's gonna come just before. And so therefore I'd have a search criteria set up so I could see then if there's any leaks and rumors before things come out. Chicago PMI being a case in point. Anyone who does trade will know Chicago PMI comes out to subscribers a few minutes before the official public release, and you can get it on Twitter way before the likes of Financial Newswires will be releasing it. Look at who writes articles. So again, I'm spending a bit of time going through these points because these are the key ones. Who writes these articles? I mean, I always say this to people: when you read the Wall Street Journal, for example, and you read a really interesting article, how often do you actually pay note to who wrote it? What's the person's name? And then cross-check it. Do they tweet? And lo and behold, they do, and fairly frequently. And hand of high-quality information. So get in a habit of opening your mind to capturing, you know, this information. People, you know, used to pay me a lot of money in my previous job as clients for me to think like this. I'm constantly thinking of how can I get information and how can I get it as quickly as possible and how can I be more informed and how can I keep my clients more informed or the traders more informed. So every time you read something, you know, ask yourself that question: who is writing this piece? Do they tweet? Are they worth following? Next is backtest and fact-find. I used to do this religiously every month, you know, and again, this sounds like it's a lot of work, right? But, you know, don't forget, this is what my job was, and so again, I'm kind of giving you the trade secrets a little bit, but here what I would do is if someone— if it became well known that Twitter was the first port of call to break a piece of information, what I would do is I'd make a note of that, and at the end of the day I'd go on to the advanced search filters on Twitter, and I would put in this exact kind of timeframe of when the initial event happened. I'd then look back chronologically and identify who was the first the first person to break this information. And more often than not, it were people who perhaps I'd never even come across before. But then I would look at the context of their tweets, how often do they tweet, and I'll put everything together to then see whether or not there's someone worth adding into my list of people to follow. So it's not, you know, nothing— and I say this with full belief— there's no such thing as luck. It's all in the preparation. You've got to put yourself in luck's way for it to materialize and for you to benefit from it. You know, I spent a whole career doing that, working silly hours doing this type of thing because I had to be that edge for the traders. And so it all, you know, a lot of this backtesting and doing the hard yards pays dividends in the end. The other thing is Continuously update and review the people you follow. People often— and I get this, I normally talk to traders when they're quite junior, they get quite excited about the prospects of what Twitter can bring. As you can tell by the things that I'm talking about, the potential edge can be huge from a time perspective, an execution point of view. But then they kind of add all these people and then they leave it, and that's not what I'm saying. It's an evolving thing. Swing. People are, you know, there's new people coming into the market adding value. There's people who are already there who are not tweeting enough, who are just cluttering your feed. Subject matter in the market is changing, you know, whether it's Turkey, whether it's inversion of the yield curve, whether it's the repo rate spike that we had in 2019. You know, you want to be altering feed to reflect the macro hierarchy of the subjects that are moving markets. So change constantly, quality over quantity is what matters when it comes to this. And then this is another thing I always used to do, and maybe not everyone is actually aware of this, but news in its local language comes out way quicker than it does in English. Now, if you were looking at Chinese press and Russian press— I'm going to pick those two because of the trade war that's been going on most recently in 2019, 2020— and then also Russia, Ukraine. Remember the annexation of Crimea in 2014? What I used to do was my first thought path was, what are all the major newspapers in Russia and Ukraine? Now, that's an easy Google search. Once I go on there, then I then look at the actual websites in Russian, and what I used to see was when I put the Russian website and then its English trans— its English version of the website, the Russian website was updating infinitely quicker. So it was almost like it would go up there and then get translated by an English-speaking team to then go on the English version. And the same thing happens in China. So what I'm saying is I used to just rely on translation tools and read literally news in its local language. And I used to find massive time edge to get into stories way before their markets would react in terms of US, UK, and European markets. So on TweetDeck, one of the systems I'll show you shortly, there is an auto translation function where you can look at tweets. So I always recommend if the subject matter is in a different language to English, then you should always follow it in in its local language if you want to be quick and react to things in that manner. Now with all this being said, it does sound like a lot of work, but this is how you can really take advantage and use Twitter if you're going to use it for trading purposes. The other way of doing this, of course, the shortcut, is to get a Squawk service like Newsquawk, for example, and there they have designated people doing this for you 24 hours a day. The other key thing I mentioned is briefly earlier, so I won't spend too much time, but improving your fundamental knowledge. What you'll— what I find is when the traders here do have it up, they spend a lot of the time— they've got their trade set up, they've got their fundamental bias, their technical setup, they're just waiting for the trade. Now while they're waiting for the trades, just having this kind of scrolling newsfeed of really quite relevant information about the broader macro environment. Subconsciously almost, they've— they're developing their understanding of markets. They're reading about things that perhaps they didn't know about. And to be an effective headline trader in the intraday environment, which is a hard skill to master, you've got to have a real breadth of knowledge to be able to action very quickly and have high conviction. And so having that awareness of your finger on the pulse is very key, and Twitter is very good at that. Trump tweets, you know, hopefully by now you can see it's not all about Donald Trump, although it is and will continue to be so when it comes to Twitter in 2020 as a main feature. And we know why is because Trump likes to use the platform of Twitter as his medium of communication for these 4 different points. you know, the kind of preemptive framing diversion. We've seen this. Actually, there was one day in December of 2019, just before Trump got impeached by the House, where he tweeted over 140 times in one day. That's just mind-blowing. But he's been tweeting, and you can see every time he's in the press, whether it's for you know, Russian relationships or election interference or for dealings with, you know, Joe Biden and Ukraine and so on, his tweets go up. If oil prices get too low or too high, his tweets go up. So it's almost like you can almost predict a bit of a pattern as to the way in which the president operates. And certainly with the timeline with the US-China trade war. Now Phase 1 looks seemingly complete. Phase 2 is quite key, and what I wanted to show you was this. This is the US election 2020 timeframe. So this is looking at, from left to right, January 2020 all the way up to the end of the year, so the entire 12 months. Now, as you can see here, we— in Feb to June, you have the primaries in the US. You then have the Democratic National Committee convention in mid-July of 2020. And then you've already got penciled in the presidential debates, which will happen in Sep and two in October of 2020 before Election Day on the 3rd of November. So if you're thinking about it ahead of time, all of these dates will be key, and they'll all be key overlaid then with the meetings between the US and China officials, because it's into these meetings where you start to see the tweet activity pick up and accelerate from the likes of Trump, and his tweets are market-moving. So again, it's a bit of a science. It's about using maths and backtesting and identification of patterns. It's not guesswork. What— to be an effective news trader, it's definitely not about being reactive. It's about being proactive, scenario building, anticipating, and Think of a 100-meter runner in the blocks, and then think of just a guy standing there, completely unaware. The guy in the blocks— bang! The gun goes, he's off. Whereas the guy here is in shock, looks around, then starts to react, sees the other guy running off and tries to chase after him. Meanwhile, the other guy is finished. That's what it's like when I try to express what it's like trading the news. And that's why most retail traders can't do it, because they don't spend enough time planning. You know, the preparation is just crucial in terms of being able to exercise a trade in that type of environment, execute a trade. So let's move on, and a quick run-through of setting up Twitter. So just go to twitter.com. You know, I know I sound like a bit of a salesman for Twitter. That's okay. I can assure you that's not the case. But set it up, and then as you can see here, this is, this is my account. I'll get on to that later. But once you have set it up, you then want to go to something called tweetdeck.twitter.com. Now that is a system which basically streams live tweets rather than you have to interact with the platform. So it allows you to monitor the tweets live of people that you follow. An easy way of doing this to get your Twitter account up and running, if you're interested in a macro overview, just go on my Twitter account and follow the people that I follow. That generally will give you a nice flavor, although, you know, rest assured this is not my definitive full list, but it's enough to get you going. If you go on TweetDeck, then what you need to do is basically organize your columns. When you go on to TweetDeck, you'll you'll see in the top right-hand corner of each column is a little settings bar. I would eliminate all columns and then start fresh. So when you click on the plus sign here, when you're on TweetDeck, which is on the left-hand side, click on Home, select your account, and that will show you everyone you follow. Then if you have any organized lists, you can then select that list. And as I said, depending on what you trade and what you're interested in, you can have different lists showcasing different information, and you can build it out from there. Here are a couple of other things to be aware of. Here at the bottom, Delta One, @4xInsight, @C_Bahrud, and @NoorHammouri. These are 4 people on, on Twitter that have a slightly different purpose. So rather than journalists or analysts or people like me putting out insight and opinion, these guys typically copy a lot of information that comes out on major news terminals and then reshare it in an almost instantaneous fashion. So if you are interested in getting news quickly in terms of headline news and you didn't have, let's say, things like a Squawk service with the audio coming out, then this can be quite a good option. and a good way of organizing this would be to bolt them into their own separate category to be able to monitor. I know we have a lot of US followers, so I just wanted to go through and talk about individual US single stock information. So in my previous job, I did spend a couple of years working on an equities desk, so, you know, talking of single equities was was some common resources that we use. StockTwits was one. If you're based in the States, you're probably very familiar. If not, you've probably never heard of them. But StockTwits is basically the largest social network for investors and traders. They got about 2 million registered members, 4 million monthly messages. And what do they talk about? Well, individual stock discussions, kind of the stocks in play or in focus of the day, prices, market sentiment. It's quite good to derive, determine from the amount of traffic going through people's commentary on certain individual stocks. So StockTwits or Twits is particularly good if you're looking at that. Otherwise, a couple of other Twitter accounts that are worth a shout out which are particularly good at breaking US single stock news. So really this is much more based for the guys in New York, perhaps stateside, side rather than the guys in, in Europe who are more trading probably the currency market. But Open Outcrier and Earnings Whispers is particularly good in earnings season, gives you nice clarity about the options implied volatility price moves on the back of earnings reports, uh, looks ahead for technical setups the day ahead, what's coming out in terms of corporate earnings for the week and so on. So they're particularly good for real-time stock and option trading headlines, breaking news, open outcries, particularly good at rumors as well and hearsay on the street, which you can often get a good time advantage on before small-cap stocks will see a bit of a pop in price. There are more sophisticated services out there, and I just wanted to give these a quick mention. These are the types of services that people would pay a lot of money for. So normally would be used by investment banks or hedge funds in particular rather than your prop trader or your retail trader. But if you were interested, there's one called Celerity, another one called DataMiner. Both do start to go into the realms of AI intelligence, looking at real-time event and risk detection. So again, if you're a hedge fund and you've got literally hundreds of millions or billions at risk in the market, then be able to be alerted to a certain type of event that is unfolding before it becomes mainstream information, you'd pay a lot of money for. So DataMiner is one of those types of services. It's used by Goldman's, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Fidelity. All the big boys will be using this type of system. But again, you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars per month in subscription fees if you are using it. So it's a slightly different level of investor that would have that. Okay, just to finish up then, on Twitter, don't forget to follow the key members of the Amplified team. So those being Sam North. Sam North is one of our senior traders. He oversees as well the live trading and the risk for the guys on our trading floor and acts as a bit of a mentor for them. He's much more based his trading decisions on the technical side of things. So if you do watch our market briefings on our YouTube channel, remember, do subscribe to the channel. You'll see Sam talking about his setups for the day. Then there's me. As I said, I'm the head of market analysis, and I put out, you know, useful infographics, thoughts about things that are occurring— Fed decisions, Bank of England, trade war, these types of things. The market fundamentals are really key for me. So that's my handle at the bottom. And then our head of trading, Piers Curran, uh, he started trading in 2001. He used to be a part of HSBC. He then worked for Goldenberg Heymeyer in their trading division, a US proprietary trading firm, back in the early noughties before then founding Amplify Trading in 2009. He absolutely is one of the people I trust the most when it comes to views on the market. And so he's also worth a follow when you get time. So hopefully that was insightful. I've had a lot of requests to do this video over the years, so hopefully it's gonna be useful for you and you've enjoyed it and it's opened your mind to a little bit of the way to view and approach using Twitter to trade and to monitor news. Any questions at all, please do feel free to leave a comment and I'll be happy happy to, to help further. All right, I'll see you next time. Thanks very much, guys.