TRADECAST

Traders explore ideas, share their trades, and express strategies with the community, fostering a more connected and engaging trading experience.

My Role

I led end-to-end design at Stocktwits, a social platform with over 8 million users and 100,000+ daily posts—connecting traders through real-time market insights and integrated trading tools.

Platform

iOS

Timeline

Q3 - Q1 ‘19 - ‘20

Create v3

Stock Symbol Tradecast Feed

Consume v3

Background

I designed Tradecast, a feature that made trading social and narrative-driven. By letting traders share the story behind their trades, it boosted engagement, encouraged community interaction, leading to increased trade volume and AUM.

Objectives

Boost Trading Activity and Assets Under Management (AUM): By enhancing social visibility and encouraging community participation, we aimed to increase user engagement and trading volume.​

Transform Trading into a Shared Narrative: Enabling users to create content linked to their trading activities encouraged discovery, sharing, and discussion of trades, driving platform growth.​

Differentiate Stocktwits in a Competitive Market: Providing seamless tools for sharing and learning from trading experiences positioned Stocktwits as a leading platform for user-generated trading content.​

Approach

The rise of zero-commission trading has made markets more accessible—but also more impulsive, especially for beginners. Trading is not just technical; it’s emotional. Yet most platforms overlook this human side.

Through user and market research, I uncovered a key loop: community conversations often drove trading decisions. By leaning into this, I designed Tradecast to make trading more expressive and social—helping traders reflect, share, and connect through their trading journeys.

Blending precision tools with creative expression, Tradecast filled a critical gap—turning trading into a communal experience and setting Stocktwits apart in a crowded market.

I referenced several trading and social platforms to understand how traders communicate their trades. There was a clear distinction between how traders communicate on technical analysis on Tradingview vs. casual commentary on r/wallstreetbets via Reddit.

Reddit v. Tradingview

A common pattern among traders on more casual platforms like Reddit was the emotional expression that varied throughout their trading journey, often influenced by market conditions and their individual positions.

Trader Emotional Journey

Turning Trades into Stories

Tradecast reimagines trading as a personal and social storytelling experience—where every trade becomes content worth sharing, reflecting on, and learning from.

Tradecast automatically generates a visual snapshot of each trade, anchored to a daily chart. Users can then personalize it with annotations, drawings, or video—capturing the strategy, emotion, and context behind their decisions.

Key Features:

  • Expressive Trade Content: Share gains, losses, strategies, and commentary through posts, videos, or live streams—adding transparency and personality to trading.

  • Integrated Sharing Tools: Seamlessly publish trade highlights, P&L summaries, and trends directly from the app.

  • Community Interaction: Engage through likes, comments, and follows—creating dialogue and connection around shared trade ideas.

  • Discoverability: Curated feeds and trending sections spotlight top trades and voices across the platform.

  • Private Journaling: For personal growth, users can save Tradecasts privately—building a visual journal to reflect on performance, emotional patterns, and long-term progress.

By combining trade execution, storytelling, and community feedback, Tradecast completes the loop between action, expression, and learning—making Stocktwits a uniquely social and self-aware trading platform.

Create v1

Create v2

Consume v2

Key Takeaways

Creation Lagged Expectations:
Content creation was lower than projected. Most users preferred quick, text-based notes with minimal visual edits.

Consumption Showed Promise:
Engagement with the Tradecast feed approached success benchmarks, indicating strong potential for growth through improved discoverability.

Next Steps

Boost Content Creation:
Encourage participation with guided prompts, contextual templates, and richer editing tools.

Refine Based on Behavior:
Lean into text-based habits by enhancing support for quick stat sharing (e.g., % gain/loss).

Expand Visibility:
Increase entry points to the Tradecast stream across the app to drive more discovery and engagement.

These insights established a performance baseline and informed the next iteration—focused on improving usability, boosting engagement, and moving closer to our success metrics.

Create v3

Consume v3