Fact of the Day - #cashtags on Twitter

As someone who has taught and been involved in finance for quite some time I am a bit ashamed that I didn't know about #cashtags on Twitter. I'm not sure if they are not that widespread or if I just somehow managed to miss them but it was something new that I learned today and thought I would share.

What are #cashtags?
They are like a Twitter hashtag but instead of putting a # on the front of a term you put a $. The feature has actually been around since 2012 and was originally for stock price news where you would use the firm ticker symbol - for example if you want Google stock price related tweets you would search for $GOOG

They have now expanded to cover ETFs, commodities, emerging markets, bonds, and cryptocurrencies. For example:

• Soybeans is $SOYB
• First Trust Hong Kong ETF is $FHK
• Australian currency is $FXA

The cryptocurrencies are mostly what you would expect ($BTC, $ETH etc) but these are possibly less useful due to the amount of spam.

Did you know about #cashtags? If not, hopefully this has been useful.