A guide to interpreting Twitter volume charts when daytrading cryptocurrencies

When developing and using my website, I have learned some things about what the charts can and can not do. In this article, I will dive into these learnings. They are:

1. Identifying which charts are valuable
2. Finding out what how interested people are in a coin
3. Identifying macro trends
4. The reaction of the market to the news.

Identifying value in a volume chart

When looking at a set of twitter results, the first step is to find out which charts are valuable, and which are distorted by noise of tweets that do return on a search query but aren't related to the coin or token. Maybe voting on usefulness is a good idea (note to self). When a query is performed, a search is made for Coin name OR Ticker symbol. This means a coin like OMG or POT will return a lot more pot-related tweets and excited general conversation tweets than cryptocurrency related results.

Seeing general interest

When looking at the charts, we see a LOT of difference between charts, which could be an indicator of something good or bad happening. The best baseline coin to demonstrate would be bitcoin since almost every bitcoin or BTC tweet would be bitcoin related. There are measurements of roughly 100 to 400 tweets per 15 minutes, with spikes of up to 1900 tweets per 15 minutes. Very interesting. This is my baseline to compare coins with.

There is quite some growth here, but there isn't enough data to explain if it's a regular amount of tweets now, the hype of the fork coming up, or a macro movement. Time will tell :)

The chart for Ethereum looks like this:

volumes doubled from at max 500 tweets per 15 minutes to a whopping 1000 tweets every 15 minutes at peak hours in a month. As with the previous case, I can't say if this is about the update for Ethereum happening or if something else is going on.

Identifying macro trends

In Tweets, there is no absolute number you can see to indicate any market sentiment. There are some trends visible though when looking at changes over time, which can be abrupt or gradual. Since there is only a month of measuring data, the gradual changes aren't visible yet, but I have identified some abrupt changes already. Notice the difference in total volume daily, 2760 tweets per day vs 50 times that.

One such example would be Binance coin. I don't know what happened on the 4th of October, but people started talking about it in more volume. Maybe some Chinese exchanges closed?

Another coin that seems to have had a shift is Ripple. There has been a big peak up to 1111 tweets in 15 minutes and is now steady between 200 and 300 tweets per 15 minutes. This is weird because there is less of the eb and flow that we usually see when the day goes around the earth. It's maybe too early to say where this is going, but I think it looks positive.

The last coin I want to address is AdEx. It seems as though a shift has taken place recently when some news came out.

Impact of news

Talking about news.. If you want to see how news is spreading through the market, a sort of hype factor, you can see that from the charts too. When comparing the chart above from AdEx with a chart of Stratis (that has also recently had a large update announced, there is a different peak. Even when at peak time there were twice the amount of tweets than with AdEx, AdEx had a higher total volume, indicating more twitter activity. The market responded heavier to the AdEx news than to the Stratis news.

Fin

These are some pieces of information I was able to extract, and I'm sure there will be much more to come. I will put up some updates when my toolbox grows. Thanks for reading, and drop a message if you've made it this far in :)