The Rise of Stock Chat Rooms and the Promise of Fast, Easy Profits:
A stock chat room is a virtual platform where an exclusive group of traders come together to discuss past, current, and potential stock trades. Between Reddit, Discord, and various other platforms, there are easily thousands of stock chat rooms on the internet.
In theory, stock chat rooms seem great because they offer a sense of community, help with trade ideas, and even mentorship potential from more experienced traders. But the reality is that many chat rooms are low quality and users don’t typically use them optimally.
Below I’ll discuss in detail the advantages and disadvantages of stock chat rooms, how to best use stock chat rooms, and my top recommendations for stock chat rooms (1 free and 1 premium). Keep in mind that not all chat rooms are created equal.
The Positive Side of Stock Chat Rooms (Advantages):
COMMUNITY
Being a full-time retail trader isn’t like having a normal job where you constantly have opportunities to interact with coworkers. In fact, many active traders don’t even have any friends or family members who also trade. This oftentimes makes trading a solitary undertaking, which isn’t necessarily bad in small doses, but sustained loneliness can have a negative impact on mindset and overall growth. So a stock chat room is a social gathering of traders with the same goal – making money in the market.
IDEA GENERATION
Another great advantage of a stock chat room is for idea generation. Since you’re only one person, you can’t have eyes on every little thing happening in the market at all times. As a result, you can end up missing some highly profitable opportunities. This is where other chat room members can help keep you updated on sectors or stocks you aren’t currently monitoring. For example, you might mainly trade blue chips while another trader mainly trades penny stocks, so you can help each other notice opportunities in both areas.
MENTORSHIP
Stock chat rooms can also be great opportunities for mentorship. Typically (at least for the better chat rooms), there are several consistently profitable traders in the community with years of experience under their belt – and you have the opportunity to interact with them. If you have meaningful questions, these traders are often more than willing to share their point of view. They have a lot of wisdom to share and can be great resources when it comes to developing and refining your own process.
The Negative Side of Stock Chat Rooms (Disadvantages):
DISTRACTION
One disadvantage of a stock chat room is that it can easily become a distraction. It’s usually from newbies or other individuals constantly bombarding the chat with beginner questions or off-topic banter, but chat rooms can quickly become an interruption to your trading operations rather than an aid. So you have to be careful in choosing one that is moderated appropriately, and also make sure that you’re not the one distracting yourself. Trying to track every little move in the market can become an addiction.
BLIND COPYING
Another negative of stock chat rooms is that they become cesspits of blind followers. In many instances, self-proclaimed trading gurus are the ones running these chat rooms – and people subscribe based on their ridiculous claims and false promises like “make $10K per month like clockwork by following my picks”. As a result, these absurd expectations make users think they’re on the fast-track to easy profits. But the truth is that attempting to blindly copy somebody else’s trades doesn’t work anywhere near as well as you think.
MARKET DISTORTION
This ties into the blind copying, but stock chat rooms can potentially cause extreme amounts of market distortion. For example, if you have a $3 stock that normally trades about 50,000 shares each day – that’s about $150,000 in volume. Then if a chat room leader or moderator says that they bought that particular stock, it could generate a mass rush of volume from chat room participants subsequently copying the trade. If just 300 chat room participants put $1,000 each into the trade, that’s an extra $300,000 in volume (double the average daily volume). This can create drastic synthetic upside price movements until buying dries up and the leader sells.
What is the Best Stock Chat Room – #1 Day and Swing Trading Chat Room Recommendations:
TRADE IDEAS (Free) – Read Full Trade Ideas Review
The Trade Ideas chat room is hosted by Barrie Einarson and is completely free, which makes it a solid place for beginners to start.
Barrie is an experienced day and swing trader, as well as an expert at using the Trade Ideas software. This software offers the best real-time stock market scanners, in my opinion, but don’t feel pressured into a paid subscription until you build core trading skills.
Countless newbies make the mistake of thinking that some sort of fancy trading tool like Benzinga Pro or Trade Ideas will automatically make them profitable, but that’s just not how it works. You have to acquire core technical, analytical, and mental skills first before it can help to stack a robust stock market newsfeed or scanner on top. These tools are pointless without a solid foundation.
Also understand that since the Trade Ideas chat room is free, you can expect a few trolls entering the room every now and then.
INVESTORS UNDERGROUND (Premium) – Read Full Investors Underground Review
Investors Underground is one of the top day and swing trading chat rooms available online because of the way that it’s moderated.
Some people complain that it’s not beginner-friendly, but in my opinion that’s exactly the way it should be. When you’re first starting out, it might be frustrating not understanding certain terminology or struggling with basic concepts, but that’s exactly what the video lessons, webinars, and courses are for. They even offer a full day trading encyclopedia and chat terminology guide.
So if you’re an absolute beginner and jumping right into chat without going through these learning resources, then that’s where you should start. The goal of the chat room is to capitalize on trade opportunities – not answer the same beginner questions over-and-over again. This might seem rude, but if you’ve ever been in a poorly moderated chat room that allows off-topic chatter – you understand.
It’s Not Just About the Chat Room Itself, But How You Personally Choose to Use it:
As stated earlier, there are thousands of stock chat rooms online – and I haven’t come anywhere close to using them all. But what I can tell you from using about twenty of them at this point is that your success depends mainly on how you use them.
If you’re joining a stock chat room with the idea of blindly copying the trades of the leader or moderators in order to capture “quick, easy profits” – then buckle up for emotional and financial pain. This approach never seems to end well. Trust me, I know.
But if you’re joining with a plan of educating yourself and learning from more experienced traders in an effort to become self-sufficient, then the chat room might actually be valuable. Of course there are some lousy ones out there, so you have to be careful, but you also need to approach your trading journey with the right mindset. Durable trading success is not a get-rich-quick endeavor.
In all honesty, most people searching for a stock chat room in order to become a successful trader should actually be looking more seriously into an in-depth training program to build skills – like Josh Schuler’s Profile Trading Pathway, for example. He doesn’t offer ineffective chat rooms, newsletters, or alerts just to pump his own positions – he offers legitimate training instead.
It’s easy to think that chat rooms are the answer, but in my personal experience, there are usually better places to learn trading.
Please let me know your thoughts and experiences with any online stock chat rooms. Which one do you think is the best?
Learn More in the Trading Success Framework Course
Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)
Related Pages:
- What is Investors Underground? Is it a Scam? Full Review
- Is Thomas Kralow Legit – Is His Trading Program Worth it?
- Is Trade Ideas a Scam – Read This Warning Before Subscribing
- Best Day Trading Stock Scanners – 2 Top Rated Tools
- What is a Stock Alert Service and Which One is the Best?
Interesting, the stock chat room setup seems just like any other help and support group out there online. It’s great to see that some traders and investors are willing to be open minded and share their experiences while at the same time mentor other students, especially beginners. I think that a community that’s based on a pursuit that you love with like-minded people is a great starter to push me even further towards what I want to achieve; in this case, trading stocks and cryptocurrency.
Hi Stephanie – thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Chat rooms have their advantages and disadvantages (as I’ve already explained in the post) – and not every chat room is created equal. But the good ones provide a great community and support system for member growth.
In the majority of cases, however, I think individuals use stock chat rooms in an attempt to create shortcuts for themselves by attempting to blindly follow trade alerts from others. I can’t stress this enough though – this sort of dependency never results in durable trading success. Far too many prospective traders do themselves a disservice by trying to cheat the process of learning, developing skills, and actually becoming self-sufficient. In my experience, there’s no other way to achieve long-lasting success than to learn how to pinpoint opportunities and capitalize on them completely on your own.
Because as prevalent as these chat rooms and alert services are, I’ve never seen or heard of anybody with absolutely no trading knowledge or skill achieve long-term success in the market by blindly mirroring guru alerts. In the end, it’s important to find not only a high-quality chat room, but also to approach it correctly (with a growth mindset).