X will now allow users to trade from their timelines. The Elon Musk-owned social network on Wednesday launched a feature called Cashtag that will let U.S. users on X place stock trades via participating brokerages. Initial partners on the effort include Interactive Brokers, Moomoo, Gemini, Kraken, and Coinbase.
The move takes advantage of what users on X have been doing for years: talking about stocks and, in more recent years, crypto. In 2008, the financial platform StockTwits even came up with the idea for X-precursor TwitterâÂÂs Cashtags, which placed a dollar sign ($) in front of stock ticker symbols to make market conversations easy to find and reference.
However, those Cashtags were about tracking the conversations around a particular stock, not actually trading them. Now that X has moved into the financial space with X Money, thatâÂÂs changed.
Now, Cashtags, which turn ticker symbols for stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies, will give X users the option to trade stocks.
âÂÂCashtags close the gap between a ticker on the timeline and the market itself. When you post or tap a ticker, youâÂÂre taken right to the asset, where you have seamless access to the live chart, the conversation around it, and now the ability to trade with one of our brokerage partners,â said Mridul Singhai, X Product Engineering Lead, in a statement shared with TechCrunch.
To use the new feature, users who tap on a supported Cashtag will be able to view the assetâÂÂs price chart and related posts on X. They can then tap âÂÂTradeâ to continue at a participating brokerage. There, theyâÂÂll sign in and complete their trade. Users can also tap on a brokerage partner to reach their mobile app or website to log in to their existing account or sign up for a new one, X notes.
âÂÂWith our Cashtag partners, weâÂÂre connecting the financial conversation to action. People come to X to discover whatâÂÂs happening, shape the conversation, and act in real-time on what matters to them,â Monique Pintarelli, SpaceXAIâÂÂs Head of Global Advertising, said in a statement. âÂÂOur Cashtag partners make it possible to move seamlessly from discovery and conversation to a brokerage, without breaking the moment.âÂÂ
However, the feature could spur more market manipulation by the way of AI-controlled bots, spammers, and other bad actors, who could attempt to shift the conversation in one direction or another. But one could argue that this is already happening on X today, even without the direct connection to brokerages.
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