Asked to stop processing trades

I’ve enjoyed using PollyTrade to place trades in my personal brokerage account, but my broker has asked us to stop offering PollyTrade as a service that interfaces with their systems. We will of course comply with their request.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting to see what other major brokerages think of PollyTrade. It’s been a little over a month since PollyTrade was defined and just over a week since we invited beta users. I processed 43 trades in my personal brokerage account via Twitter using PollyTrade, and never experienced any type of error in the trades that were carried out.

But the idea of originating stock trades via Twitter is of course very new. As Twitter grows and is seen as a safe platform, we hope one or more brokers will allow us to continue PollyTrade service for their customers.

Trade stocks via Twitter. Open for beta users!

Tweet this (@pollytrade buy 10 shares AAPL) to actually buy 10 shares of Apple. That’s PollyTrade, and it’s ready for a small number of beta users!

Short story…

I left my perch as co-founder and CEO of Engine Yard in May and needed something to do, so I spec’d out 2 new Twitter services. PollyTrade is the first to reach beta “done-ness”.

Even though I’m on business #6 in my life and you’d think it’d be old hat, there’s always an intense drive to reach the goal and it never seems like things can move fast enough. Plus there are always little things coming up at the last minute.

I thought of the idea for PollyTrade sometime in early 2009. I wanted to tweet a stock trade and have it actually be executed in my brokerage account. I have accounts at 3 of the well-known online brokers. I chose one that most of my friends have, too, and we got to work on writing the software to interface to that broker.

PollyTrade runs at Engine Yard and was written in Ruby on Rails by a developer in San Francisco (Mike). We also got help from Jeromy in Minneapolis on site design.

We’ve been working pretty much non-stop to get the system working consistently, get the website reasonably decent, and process enough trades to feel comfortable about the system. Over 30 trades have been executed. I know that’s not a huge number, but it’s been enough to track the orders from me to Twitter to PollyTrade to my brokerage account and back, and make any needed corrections.

The worst bug we found & fixed was one that would cause stock trades to fail if the original tweet used capital letters in some key places. That’s all been resolved so you can use any combination of upper- and lowercase.

As mentioned above, we’re looking for a small number of beta users.

We want to keep the beta user group relatively small at first, say 10 active users, so we can carefully monitor activity and solve any problems under a light user load.

If you’re a very comfortable stock trader who is very comfortable using Twitter, please let us know if you’re interested in trying out PollyTrade. Please read everything on the How it Works page before you decide to be a beta user.

To apply to be a beta user, just fill out our short Registration Form. New accounts are inactive by default, so we will need to communicate with you and activiate your account before you can use PollyTrade.

Have Comments?

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Almost ready for beta users

It’s been a week since PollyTrade executed what is quite possibly the first automated stock trade executed via Twitter.

Since then, we’ve been doing many more test transactions and we haven’t encountered any errors. Meanwhile, we’re working on the user interface and checking off various “housekeeping” tasks before we invite early beta users to try the system.

We also have a growing list of things for v1.1.