Twitter TWTR, -0.52% in general, can feel about as useful as a football bat. That includes the wonky corner of Finance Twitter, where the armchair analysts and the Wall Street wannabes share, steal and mock each other’s ideas. Finding the good stuff amid the noise can be a real time-suck, but it does exist.
That’s where the must-follow lists come in.
MarketWatch is just one of many publications that creates its own version, with the aim of helping investors avoid the bots and the blowhards.
Jason Goepfert of the Sentiment Trader blog recently put out one of his own, but he says he eschewed the typical metrics in an effort to compile the “ultimate list of the most useful accounts.”
“Most of the ‘best of’ lists... are based on personal preferences or, worst of all, a simple follower count,” he said. “Much of Finance Twitter is dominated by insular circles that quote and retweet each other, fist-bumping and high-fiving. That leaves other accounts that might provide more use out in the cold.”
Goepfert, without going into specifics, says he used stats from software company SparkToro to determine the quality of almost 200 accounts.
“Not just the raw number of followers, but how engaged — and engaging — those accounts are,” he explained. “It tracks the metrics that truly matter and comes up with scores to determine how potentially useful a Twitter account is to follow.”
Basically, the worthwhile accounts tend to have a healthy number of followers versus the number of accounts they follow, they post several times a day and they get plenty of engagement. Many of them you won’t find on the typical list.
Topping the list is Peter Brandt, a longtime commodity trader and highly-regarded chartist. He may not have the million-plus followers as, say, Josh Brown (whose popular “Reformed Broker account comes in way down at number 119 on the list), but he makes up for it in quality of the content.
Brandt’s posts range from chart-heavy predictions...
The most famous all-time continuation H&S (actually a complex continuation H&S). $DJIA That's right, the Dow was once under 1,000 -- and I bought the breakout. pic.twitter.com/KOxZQdDvfG
— Peter Brandt (@PeterLBrandt) July 7, 2018
