The 'Cashtag' Is Exploding in Popularity and Social Investing is Accelerating...What's Next?

Good morning everyone…

Social Investing is accelerating. Just in time for me as I received my trademark for ‘The Degenerate Economy’.

Also, just in time for the second annual Cashtag Awards on May 4. Our awards have never been about the best of ‘Stocktwits’ alone. Vlad at Robinhood won the ‘Castag Legend’ award last year and this year we have categories for product and people that rely on the whole social web.

Back in 2007, I sent the first ‘cashtag’ on Twitter to Fred Wilson from my Blackberry to his. Fred was the early investor in Twitter. He thought it was genius and soon after I started Stocktwits. The longer version of the origin story is here.

In the last week (19 years later), both Twitter and Robinhood have embraced the ‘cashtag’ ($). Here is Nikita with the Twitter announcement…

Here is Robinhood…

Having the giants Twitter and Robinhood embrace the cashtag, and ‘social trading and investing’ is not solely about ‘competition’. Stocktwits has long dealt with competition for users, distribution and attention. This is about rapid TAM (total addressable market) expansion. We are thrilled about this at Stocktwits.

Of course some of our users will use Twitter and Robinhood, but the millions of new users that Twitter and Robinhood will bring into the cashtag and social investing world will come try Stocktwits as well.

We have been preparing for this at Stocktwits for the last few years. Here are four posts I have shared over this time outlining how we leaned into this future with our ‘Stocktwits Everywhere’ focus…

• The Cashtag and The Internet Of Money...You Must Be Everywhere in 2025...That Is Stocktwits Plan Too

• Building One and Three Year Plans- Stocktwits Everywhere, Stocktwits AI and Idea Agents, Stocktwits Video, Stocktwits Investor Relations, Social Relative Strength and The Stocktwits Sentiment Index

• Stocktwits 'Everywhere' Expands With Alpaca Global Partnership - More Ideas, More Signal, More Alpha

• New From Stocktwits - Live Earnings Calls With Unique Chat and Sentiment

Over the next 90 days, a brand new Stocktwits is being launched. Our everyday users are starting to notice it, but the ticker pages, the ‘for you’ stream, the onboarding, the profile pages, the message box, the search and the data - have been reimagined for the community with a modern infrastructure and API’s, that will better reward the contributors and the passive lurkers with idea generation, decision making and publishing. Every part of the platform will be more social and have AI infused capabilities.

As both a CEO and venture investor I am witnessing first hand both the AI headwinds and tailwinds for founders and their companies. The internet is being consumed by AI. The internet is just a data source for the machine led AI world. The companies that exist on the internet with unique data (like Stocktwits) are mostly safe, but every old new company has a much bigger distribution and attention problem than ever before. That is why the Stocktwits team has been living a ‘Stocktwits Everywhere’ life.

So what are the weaknesses of Twitter and Robinhood social?

Twitter has scale no doubt, but the financial vertical is just a small aspect of Twitter’s attention and plan.

For Twitter, I have long written here that they are no longer ‘real time’. If you use Twitter (or Instagram or Tik Tok) you are living in a ‘post real-time world’. Here are some of my pieces on the subject. The algorithm based business model has rendered Twitter mostly useless unless you can afford to pay for the expensive API. Furthermore, Trump is the most important node in the Twitter network but he posts from his own platform so Stocktwits sees his posts at the same time as Twitter and in fact Trump is easier to find and digest on Stocktwits.

Trust is also a huge factor in social investing. On Twitter, users can delete posts. That means I can’t trust anyone’s timeline. You should not either.

One major difference on Stocktwits is we do not let users delete posts. We track every ‘cashtagged’ post with a ‘price since’. Our new message box (next 60 days), infused with AI, will bring incredible new benefits to those that use Stocktwits to build their financial brand and improve their investing with feedback tailored to how they have performed, how they can improve, products and people they may like and fresh ideas that fit their strategy.

I am very excited to see the Robinhood social product and ‘cashtags’ in full production. Robinhood is a brokerage first. Robinhood makes their money from trade volume and assets under management. It makes sense that Robinhood launch a social product to increase trade volume and with 27 million accounts, I imagine at least 10-20 percent will at least try the social product. But Robinhood is closed. You will have to have a Robinhood account to be seen. Robinhood will also have to deal with tough decisions about spam and abuse and losing actual customers that comes with moderation.

Most importantly, Robinhood’s entry into social will force brokerages around the world to consider social and the cashtag. Stocktwits is the most open partner a brokerage or financial media company could have and we have been fielding calls daily due to the Twitter and Robinhood news.

US Stocks and Markets Go Global

Another underappreciated aspect of social investing and trading is that US stocks, options and futures (and soon predictions and betting) are now global. This is a new phenomenon/trend.

Our firm Social Leverage was a seed investor in Alpaca.markets which has exploded in growth the last few years. Alpaca powers hundreds of ‘Robinhood’s’ around the globe. I call them the ‘Intel Inside’ of brokerage. Today, over 10 million investors have access to US stocks and markets through Alpaca. Soon it will be hundreds of millions. A certain percentage of those users already use Stocktwits and Twitter for community and data. Having Alpaca as a distribution partner for Stocktwits streams, sentiment and news is important.

What about Predictions and Betting?

I will keep this brief because it is DAY 1 of predictions and betting.

I believe that predictions and bets are much more social than stocks and markets. Bragging rights is human nature.

Stocktwits has already partnered with Polymarket, but we also have plans for our own social prediction products.

We plan to be the leader in how predictions and bets are ‘cashtagged’ and organized around streams for social consumption, but also happy to have a much wider ecosystem of companies and people thinking about this opportunity.

Have a great Sunday.