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 in 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 Twitter’s 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 trading them. Now that X has moved into the financial space with X Money, that’s changed.
Now, Cashtags, which turn ticker symbols for stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies into interactive destinations, will give X users the option to trade stocks.
“Cashtags close the gap between a ticker on the timeline and the market itself. When you post or tap a ticker, you’re 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,” 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 asset’s price chart and related posts on X. They can then tap “Trade” to continue at a participating brokerage. There, they’ll 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.
“With our Cashtag partners, we’re connecting the financial conversation to action. People come to X to discover what’s happening, shape the conversation, and act in real-time on what matters to them,” Monique Pintarelli, SpaceXAI’s head of Global Advertising, said in a statement. “Our Cashtag partners make it possible to move seamlessly from discovery and conversation to a brokerage, without breaking the moment.”
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.