Joe Donohue is a busy man. Besides being the chief executive of Desert Shores Capital LP, a long/short fund, he manages a financial blog and Twitter feed called UpsideTrader, one of the websites in StockTwit's empire. StockTwit hosts a variety of discussion forums on stocks, technical analysis and macro-level thinking for interested hedge fund managers, analysts and traders.
Donohue has been trading for 25 years and worked in a range of areas including retail brokerage, capital markets and institutional trading. After managing a hedge fund, he founded his current fund with a partner earlier this year.
He began tweeting under the handle @upsidetrader as a way to communicate with his blog readers in real time. So far, he's amassed a following of 8,789 Twitter users.
Sample Tweet: "$MOS in trouble, close to yesterdays low and daily got spanked on big volume yesterday (at 50dma)"
He likes the way Twitter evolved into a way to share thoughts with his subscribers instantaneously. "You have the ability to block out the noise," he said. "If people are chirping too much on twitter, you can simply unfollow that person. You can tailor-make your stream."
Donohue follows 252 other Twitter users. "They're the key to what I want to do all day. They add value to my trading," he said.
Here are two of his favorite Twitter feeds:
Adam Warner
@agwarner
Adam Warner is an author and proprietary option trader with Addormar Co, Inc. He traded as a member of the American Stock Exchange from 1988-2001.
Sample Tweet: "markets pretty wide in $VVUS, I like the long $call spread idea with perhaps selling additional higher strike, but huge slippage if legging."
Vic Scherer
@daytrend
Vic Scherer is a day trader of stocks and ETFs who blogs at daytrend. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering and working in that field, he decided to leave his job and trade full-time. He offers updated market stats on his feed all day long.
Sample Tweet: "93.2% are in bottom half of today's range. 45.4% of stocks are in the bottom 20% of today's range. 16.3% are in the bottom 10%. 10:36ET $$"