Part Two: How Futures Traders Ignore 99% of News And Focus On Trade Relevance

Most trading news is irrelevant. Too much effort is spent scrolling irrelevant trade headlines, but only the top futures traders know what to ignore. 

There is even more “noise” when it comes to the social media firehose of news and tweets.

Futures traders should not have buddies tweeting on NFL and NBA in your trading feed.

In this article, we are going to show traders a process and strategy to filter and be alerted to breaking news that moves futures and commodity markets.
 

Relevance Matters for Market Moving Sources

Trading is a business, and your news feed should only include sources and profiles that influence the market. Good sources of relevant market movers are politicians, analysts, financial influencers, big media, and industry-specific companies.

Any twitter handle that promotes or highlights reports or sells trading services should be ignored and filtered.

Follow Futures Magazine On Twitter - @FuturesTradMag

Try to keep the news feed simple and ignore anything not related to markets you trade. 

Create Market Moving Twitter Trading List
 

If you have a Twitter account, then you already have a TweetDeck.  

Log in to your Twitter account to create a List focused on ‘Market Moving Trading Sources.’

Follow the below instructions to create “List”:

1. Visit your Twitter Lists page via the gear icon drop-down menu or by clicking Lists on your profile page
   
   
2. Click Create List
3. Name List & provide a description (something market related)
   
   
    
4. Designate the List as Public or Private (see Futures Magazine public lists here)
5. Save the List
    

Borrow Another Traders Twitter List

Traders can borrow Twitter lists from a reputable news agency, hedge fund managers, financial bloggers or other traders. Some of these sources make lists public for any user to use.

While starting from scratch and creating your list is an easy task, the chances are that someone has already created the list you are looking for (you are probably not the only trader interested in crypto exchange outages or commodity trading.) To find these lists, you have a couple of options.

You can borrow Futures Magazine Twitter lists. Most of Futures Magazine lists are for futures, commodities, global macro, and crypto traders.

Another great way to discover a Twitter list is to do a Google search. In Google search, type ‘ site:twitter.com/*/lists “KEYWORD.” For example below we used “Crypto Trading” as our keyword’. This search returned a variety of public Twitter lists, hopefully matching the topic we want our crypto traders to monitor.

Adding List To Your Tweetdeck

Great, now you have Twitter lists to monitor market-moving events. This is essential for traders monitoring news flow as tweets from these financial sources will (hopefully) contain information that impacts price movements of stocks, futures or commodity prices.

Now, you need to add a column to your TweetDeck which will let you see the tweets coming from the members of your list in real-time.

Go to the left-hand side of your TweetDeck, hit the plus sign, and select “List” from the column options. Then, select the list you are interested in, and you are done!

Trader Basics: Searching List & Filters For Tweetdeck

My favorite part of Tweetdeck is the column format that filters and organizes each keyword trading topic. Traders can look for Tweets that contain content around events, topic, stock or futures symbol, sector research, industry conferences, weather, natural disasters, and black swan events.

The Tweetdeck content filters can be accessed by clicking on the edit button at the top right of the column and have four main filtering options:

1. Search --Type in a Futures or Commodity search term in the top-left search bar.
   
   
2. Showing – This can be switched from showing – All Tweets, Tweets With Images, Tweets with Videos, Tweets with any Media (images + videos), or Tweets with Links. Our proprietary traders prefer a less cluttered feed with teets and links only.
   
   Matching – This will show only Tweets with specific futures or commodity trading keywords in the Tweet content. A few examples are:
   
   Excluding – This will omit Tweets that contain a specific keyword. Common trading words that have other meanings can clutter your trading feed. 
    
3. Tweetdeck Feed Filtered Output
    
4. Select Curated List -- Click enter and then expand the content filter and select Tweets with images.
    

Trade Basics: Location Of Interest For Commodity Traders

For many global macro and commodity traders, one of the most useful ways to use TweetDeck is searching for tweets by location.

You can filter Twitter by geolocation. Twitter then filters tweets in the column sent from that precise location.

Recently our traders were monitoring California Wildfires and the impact on PCG stock and the electricity market in a specific location. The possibilities are limitless for agricultural and energy sector traders to get a trading edge.

To search by geolocation, open a search column on your TweetDeck and enter “geocode:coordinate,coordinate,Xkm“ where “coordinate,coordinate” is the location you want to search, and "Xkm" is the radius around the specific location that you want to search.

Google Maps can be used to acquire geolocation codes for areas of interest.

Related Tweetdeck for Trading Series - Part 1 and Part 3

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we will suggest the “17 Best Trading Market Sources To Follow On Twitter”.  This article gives traders a head start on creating a curated trading news source list.

If you missed Part 1, then check it out, “Top Futures Traders Use Tweetdeck For Breaking News Trading Strategy.”  This article highlights why top futures traders use Tweetdeck to gain a news trading edge.
 

TRADING FUTURES, COMMODITIES, AND OPTIONS INVOLVES SUBSTANTIAL RISK OF LOSS AND IS NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL TRADERS. THE USE OF STOP LOSS ORDERS OR CONTINGENT ORDERS MAY NOT PROTECT PROFITS OR LIMIT LOSSES TO THE AMOUNT INTENDED. CERTAIN MARKET CONDITIONS MAY EFFECT FUTURES EXCHANGE PRICES. USING TWEETDECK AND OTHER NEWS SOURCES IS A TRADING AND INFORMATION TOOL AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSTRUED AS A TRADING STRATEGY WITHOUT PROPER RESEARCH AND BACKTESTING.