If you’re wondering if you can use Notifier to track mentions of stocks on subreddits like wallstreetbets, then the answer is definitely you can. We have recently, because of the wallstreetbets drama going on these days, have been getting a large influx of users who have been asking us about how they can do this with Notifier and what the best way to set this up is. So with that in mind, we thought we would throw together a quick tutorial to show you how to do that.
What is wallstreetbets (Skip this section if you already know)?
So what is wallstreetbets? Well if you’re reading this article, you’re probably already familiar with it. But just in case you’re not, wallstreetbets is a subreddit on Reddit, a very popular one. At this point, they have 7.6 million members.
Their tagline is “Like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal.’ And if you don’t understand what that means or that doesn’t describe it for you, their culture is a bit eclectic so there’s a lot of cursing going on, a lot of strange insults that you’ll see are kind of being thrown out that aren’t really kind of insult, its hard to describe.
But if you get in there and kind of browse around, you’ll quickly pick up some of the lingo and some of the common things that they say.
Now what they are all about, to be honest, is least that I’ve seen in browsing that subreddit, they’re all about taking high risks-high reward bets on the stock market. So they identify these opportunities and then they kind of glorify the idea of going for them. There’s a lot of kind of YOLO idea, You Only Live Once”. So that is what this subreddit is all about.
Now recently why they’ve come into the news is because they have kind of taken on the hedge funds in a dramatic way. A hedge fund if you’re not familiar, it’s a broad term at this point, that’s a very very broad term but high-level hedge fund is a company that pulls together investments from different investors and tries to get a return of some kind on various different types of investments. Some of these hedge funds are more geared towards investing in companies, building companies and then selling them off, things like that. And there are other hedge funds that actively invest in the market and take high-risk positions in the stock market. Other hedge funds actually use shorting, taking a short position in stocks. Without getting into it too in-depth because it’s beyond the script of this article, shorting a stock involves purchasing a bet essentially that you believe that stock is going to lower in price. So a lot of these hedge funds placed bets on the market once that game stocks would go down in value.
Keep in mind that we are simplifying a lot of things here, that’s in essence what happened. This subreddit, wallstreetbets, got together and with their collective buying power and the fact that they have so many members, they all got together and agreed to purchase these game stocks and that kind of rose it’s value substantially. We actually have an article that’s coming out soon on what happened with r/wallstreetbets subreddit and I will link that in this tutorial so you can check it out.
How to use Notifier to Track Stock Mentions in r/wallstreetbets
Now that you know what they are, let’s get into how you can use Notifier to track mentions of stocks on this r/wallstreetbets subreddit, as well as any subreddits. I’m going to show you two different methods in this tutorial on how to do this with Notifier. One is going to use traditional, normal string matches and the other is going to use what’s called Regular Expression or RegEx for short.
Getting the Seacher Setup
So I’m already logged in to Notifier with a demo account. If you want to start tracking mentions of stocks, then you just need to click on Add Searcher.
- Searcher Type: For the first example, the Searcher Type is going to be string.
- Search String: We’re going to put in the stock that we want to monitor. For this example, I’m going to put in the GME stock which is the game stock.
- Post/Comments: I’m going to put both.
- Case Sensitivity: I am going to select True for this. Now, why do I want it to be case sensitive? This is important here because, in order to get the most relevant matches, you need to make sure that it’s only finding instances of the string that are capitalized, otherwise, you’re going to get a lot of useless stuff. This is not a great example here but there one stock that is ON and if it’s not case sensitive, you will get matches for things like on.
- Notification Type: Is going to be email.
- Notification Interval: Is going to be instant because I want to get notified instantly when the match happens.
- Include/Exclude Subreddits?: I’m going to say include only from this subreddit – in this case, wallstreetbets. If you want to include multiple subreddits, you’ll just separate them with a comma.
That’s all the option we need, so we’ll click Add Searcher so it’s out there searching wallstreetbets for the string GME, all in capital letters.
Matching Using String Matching
Matching Whole Words Only
Now let’s talk about matching whole words only with Notifier because there’s a problem currently with this example Searcher that we have come up with. Right now it’s not only matching whole words so if there was some string that was capitalized and had these characters in it, it could also possibly match on that. Now this is not a great example because GME is not very common in words but maybe you see something like GMEN, this might come up.
A better example of where you can get results you don’t want is if you’re searching for maybe one of the tickers like LOVE. If you type that in and if you don’t have whole word matching or do something to trigger whole word matching, then anytime someone puts LOVE in capital letters, it will match on that. Making the case sensitivity True helps with that but it can still match on things you don’t want.
So right now, what you can do to fix this, is you can make Notifier do whole word matching. This is not perfect because right now we’re working on an option that you will only select whole word match which will work better. But this is one way to get around this and to cause whole word matching.
- Using Spaces
What you simply want to do is put a space in front of the string. This will cause it to only match strings where there is a space before GME so this gets you a lot closer to what you’re possible looking for. This is not perfect so we do advice just searching, for now, just for the capitalized result for GME.
- Using $
Another thing you can do is using a $ sign. As many people on the wallstreetbets subreddit, whenever they mention a stock ticker in order to make to more apparent that they are talking about a stock ticker, they put a dollar sign in front of it. If you search for $GME, then you’ll know that every match for that string that you get, it going to be for that specific stock symbol.
But not everyone does that. So it just depends on if you’re willing to throw it all out some of those examples where people may just be putting GME but they’re actually mentioning a stock so keep that in mind.
- Whole Word Matching Coming Soon!
And like we said, we’re working on the whole word matching and you’ll be able to just trigger an option to find GME but only as a word.
Matching using Regex
The second way to do it is to use our Regular Expression searching in order to search for whole word matches. This is more advanced functionality, certainly, but right now while we are getting the whole word matching developed, this can be a more accurate way to search for them and I am going to run you through on how to get that set up.
The first thing I recommend you do is to go to regex101.com and test this out for yourself first. With Regular Expression matching, there is an approach for doing whole word matches. And the way to that is by using a token in your Regular Expression that indicates that you want to whole word matching.
You can see that if I type in GME, it matching GME that’s just a word and clearly where someone mentions a stock but also mentioned it here where this is a part of a word. So what we want to do is tell Regular Expressions to only find us whole word matches of this string GME, all in capitals.
So what we’re going to do is put a backslash b (\b) at the beginning of the string and a backslash b (\b) at the end of the string and that tells the Regular Expression engine to only match the whole world. As you can see now, it’s only matching GME where this is a word.
So with that in mind, you can copy this Regular Expression in its entirety and then you can come back over to the Notifier for Reddit dashboard and add a new Searcher.
- Searcher Type: This time we’re going to select regex
- Search String: I’m going paste in the regular expression \bGME\b that we just worked out before
- Post/Comments: I want it both for post and comments
- Case Sensitivity: You can leave that as False. It does not matter for a RegEx match
- Notification Type: We’re going to do email
- Notification Interval: The interval is instant
- Include/Exclude Subreddits?: Here we also need to include or exclude subreddits so we’re going to include and we just want to include wallstreetbets subreddit. Then we’re going to click Add Searcher for that Regular Expression searcher to be running.
Now that our searchers have been running for a while, let’s go to our inbox and see if we have gotten any results. And so yes, there’s a lot of results that have come in. I’m going to take a look at some of them and let see if any of them look relevant. So yeah great, a lot of the results are very relevant and using the all capital version of the tickers seems to be a great way to get mostly the results that you expect.
So that’s what we recommend. Starting with the simple search string matching for capital letters of the stocks you want to track, keeping it case sensitive so it’s only searching for those capital letters. And if that starts to run into trouble for you, if you’re getting too many results that are not what you’re looking for, then you can possibly move over to the Regular Expression and see how that works out for you.
Setup a Test Searcher
One thing we always recommend that you do is run a test so once you have your searcher running and you want to test how it’s working you can actually insert now a test object into production. This will only work for your user, no one else would get the alert email but you can actually test out and see if your searcher is not behaving as you have expected. If you’re running any problems with this, let us know. You can always reach out to us by either emailing us at [email protected] or now you can even chat with us with the chat window and we will get back with you ASAP.
Trending Stocks Tool is Coming Soon!
Finally, another thing to keep in mind is that our trending stocks tool is coming soon. And let me tell you what that going to be. If you are not already familiar with our Reddit Stats functionality, it’s basically a page where we are listing the most popular subreddits on Reddit both based on comments and you can also view it based on posts. And then if you click on to each subreddit, you’ll see more advance traffic analytics for each subreddit.
So wallstreetbets, if you click on it, you can view when it has been the most popular. You can also sort that by only Post so the most post was submitted Thursday at 13h.
And for comments, it’s actually similar so that’s when the wallstreetbets subreddit has been the most popular.
Here’s another interesting one for dogecoin which is a cryptocurrency. As the cryptocurrency that is basically a doge so it’s a doge cryptocurrency. Now as you can see, last week dogecoin actually spiked in its price and in traffic about it. So we can see that in our dataset and this is actually been referred more heavily in our data set because we are still building it. But basically last week on Friday, huge traffic spiked for dogecoin and that’s why you see that there are so many comments and posts during that time period for Friday and Saturday and much less before that.
So that is our Reddit Stats functionality. Now we’re building a Trending Stocks Tool, which in some ways, is going to be similar so we’re going to have a list in the wallstreetbets subreddit what stocks are trending over some timeframe in that subreddit. This will allow you to quickly jump in here, take a look and see how in the past x hours and x days, this stock has been trending and you’ll be able to see exactly where it’s mention and kind of gather additional intelligence on it and maybe possibly take some action on it. That a very exciting development that we are working on. If you want to be notified on that, let us know. Message us or sign up for the tool and we’ll certainly let you know as soon as it comes out which should be within the next few days if you’re reading this. And we’re going to make it better, adding on to it so let us know what you think of it and what additional functionality you would like to see.
Wrap Up
That wraps us this tutorial. As always, let us know if you have any feedback, something you’re looking to do or if you just have any questions and this tutorial did not answer them for you and reach out to us via our chat box on the main landing page or send us an email at [email protected].