Think of PollyTrade as a link between your Twitter account & your brokerage account. You send tweets that cause orders to be placed in your brokerage account, and PollyTrade tweets each order status back to you.

There’s a lot of IMPORTANT INFORMATION further down this page, so please be patient and read all of it if you’re thinking of being a beta user.

First, how to use PollyTrade…

(1) Register as PollyTrade Beta User

When you register with PollyTrade, you tell our system 3 things:

a. Who you are (name, email address, Twitter username)

b. Your brokerage account (username & password)

c. A password to protect your PollyTrade account settings (only you can review/change/delete the info you provide)

Registration only needs to be done once.

(2) Tweet your Trades

Once you’re registered with PollyTrade, you can send tweets to execute trades in your brokerage account.

PollyTrade receives your tweet and passes the order to your broker to execute it.

The tweet trading format is: @pollytrade buy/sell quantity shares ticker

So, to buy 100 shares of GE: @pollytrade buy 100 shares GE

Or, to sell 200 shares of Apple: @pollytrade sell 200 shares AAPL

The word “shares” is included on purpose. For instance, in the first example, it’s clear that you’re buying 100 shares of GE, NOT 100 dollars worth of GE.

Order Types Supported

PollyTrade supports these order types & parameters:

• Stocks
• Buy or Sell
• Market Price
• Good for Day Only

(3) PollyTrade tweets back Order Status

After communicating with your broker, PollyTrade tweets back your order status. This is typically a brokerage order number, but if something went wrong, you’ll receive an error message. Typically, errors occur because the original buy/sell tweet was incorrectly formatted, or because your broker refused the order. Your broker may refuse the order for a number of reasons, but typically because you tried to sell shares you don’t have or because you don’t have enough cash to execute a buy order, etc.

(4) Confirm transactions in your brokerage Account

It’s a good idea to log into your brokerage account every so often and confirm the trades that have been received from you via PollyTrade & Twitter. We suggest that you log in after tweeting 5-10 orders, or at least once a week.

IMPORTANT TOPICS

Use Caution

PollyTrade takes your word that you mean what you tweet and passes it to your broker for immediate order execution. There is no confirmation back to you other than “Order Accepted” or “Error”.

There are risks when trading this way. You can’t see all the information that you see when your’re logged into your brokerage account, such as share quantities owned, nor can you see any kind of order confirmation page before you actually place a firm order.

This means that you might try to sell shares you don’t have (most brokers will block this, which will generate an error back to PollyTrade), or you might buy more shares than you thought (maybe you typed 1000 when you meant 100). Or you might type the wrong ticker symbol, such as AAP instead of AAPL.

In addition, most brokerage accounts will let you spend cash + margin with amazing ease. We did tests with different share quanties of Apple and our brokerage account used up all available cash + all available margin without even blinking. Only when we exceeded the combined total of cash + margin did we get an order refusal and therefore an error message back to PollyTrade. (I’m going to see if margin can be disabled in my personal brokerage account, since I never use it.)

No Brakes on Trading

PollyTrade does not enforce any limits on your trading. You can buy or sell your entire brokerage account value if you choose to do so (or even more than the account cash value, if you use margin, too).

Twitter Network Errors & Risks

Twitter is increasingly reliable, but not 100% reliable (no network is).

We have seen one case where a Direct Message (not a stock trade) was sent by the sender just once but was received by the recipient twice. We know Twitter has implemented systems to prevent duplicates, but at least this one case seems to have gotten through.

PollyTrade has no provision to stop duplicate orders, whether they come from you (on purpose) or from Twitter (not on purpose).

Conversely, there’s no way for PollyTrade to know about stock trade tweets from you that never get delivered to PollyTrade.

Are My Trades Public?

Only your trade orders are public, such as “buy 100 shares IBM”. That’s what you tweet to @pollytrade, so people can see it if they follow you (see note below for nuance).

But your brokerage account info is NOT public. The public will never see your brokerage account login or other details.

All trades are placed and confirmed using Twitter “mentions” (you send trades to @pollytrade and it replies to @you). So anyone who follows you and @pollytrade will see your trades. But it’s nuanced: if they don’t follow both you and @pollytrade, then they won’t see your trades unless they go to your Twitter page and look at your timeline.

You might wonder why we didn’t support direct messages to keep trades private. We will support DMs in the near future, but we decided that the @reply format is more familar to people and a better way for us to get started with minimal obstacles for users.

Data Security

Your tweets are public, so we do not make any attempt to encrypt your tweets. But your brokerage account login info is very sensitive, so it is encrypted in our database. It’s only exposed to your broker, and only when you send a trade.

Beta Period, Limited Users

PollyTrade is new and is in beta mode. We are accepting a small number of users who are comfortable with stock trading and comfortable with Twitter.

When you register, we will contact you and then decide whether or not to activate your account.

If you are one of these early beta users, you must use PollyTrade with a brokerage account that does NOT contain a substantial portion of your wealth.

Set up a new brokerage account that’s separate from your other accounts. That means it should have a separate login from any other brokerage accounts you have.

Fund the new account with a limited amount of cash just for use with PollyTrade.

Order Execution Time

Our system checks for new orders every minute. Transaction processing time is typically a few seconds. So, depending on exactly when you tweet your trade, the trade will reach your broker in 3-63 seconds. This of course assumes that Twitter is operating smoothly. We have no control over the speed of Twitter.

From the Founder of PollyTrade

I opened a new brokerage account and funded it with an amount that’s useful for trading but which would not radically affect my life if I lost it. I certainly don’t plan on losing it, but I’m cautious with my money and you should be, too. I’m balancing risk with the reward of trying something new & convenient.

I originally funded the account with a small sum of money so we could execute trades without worry of much loss if something went terribly wrong. I transferred a larger sum on June 25, 2009, once we passed the 25th successful trade via PollyTrade.