Trade stocks via Twitter. Open for beta users!

Posted in News. Written by pollytrade on June 26th, 2009

Tweet this (@pollytrade buy 10 shares AAPL) to actually buy 10 shares of Apple. That’s PollyTrade, and it’s ready for a small number of beta users!

Short story…

I left my perch as co-founder and CEO of Engine Yard in May and needed something to do, so I spec’d out 2 new Twitter services. PollyTrade is the first to reach beta “done-ness”.

Even though I’m on business #6 in my life and you’d think it’d be old hat, there’s always an intense drive to reach the goal and it never seems like things can move fast enough. Plus there are always little things coming up at the last minute.

I thought of the idea for PollyTrade sometime in early 2009. I wanted to tweet a stock trade and have it actually be executed in my brokerage account. I have accounts at 3 of the well-known online brokers. I chose one that most of my friends have, too, and we got to work on writing the software to interface to that broker.

PollyTrade runs at Engine Yard and was written in Ruby on Rails by a developer in San Francisco (Mike). We also got help from Jeromy in Minneapolis on site design.

We’ve been working pretty much non-stop to get the system working consistently, get the website reasonably decent, and process enough trades to feel comfortable about the system. Over 30 trades have been executed. I know that’s not a huge number, but it’s been enough to track the orders from me to Twitter to PollyTrade to my brokerage account and back, and make any needed corrections.

The worst bug we found & fixed was one that would cause stock trades to fail if the original tweet used capital letters in some key places. That’s all been resolved so you can use any combination of upper- and lowercase.

As mentioned above, we’re looking for a small number of beta users.

We want to keep the beta user group relatively small at first, say 10 active users, so we can carefully monitor activity and solve any problems under a light user load.

If you’re a very comfortable stock trader who is very comfortable using Twitter, please let us know if you’re interested in trying out PollyTrade. Please read everything on the How it Works page before you decide to be a beta user.

To apply to be a beta user, just fill out our short Registration Form. New accounts are inactive by default, so we will need to communicate with you and activiate your account before you can use PollyTrade.

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