How to Make Money with Captain

Naturally, a question we get asked a lot is “How do I make money using Captain’s tools?”. There’s a lot of different ways to answer that depending on the preferred style of the trader asking, which we cover further below.

The short answer:
Yes.

We put our money where our mouth is on this and started trading Captain’s corporate money in August 2021 to prove it (all of our trades are 3rd party verified). You can read more about how we decided to do this, what we’ve been investing in, and how Captain tools inform our decisions on our blog.

The longer answer:
We’ve talked about different trading styles and finding yours before. For this discussion we’ll mainly use short and long time frame preference to categorize the ways you could make money with Captain (not to be confused with short / long trades, we’re talking about amounts of time here).

Before we dive into that, it’s worth noting the central thesis of Captain that underpins all of this: Captain lets you tap into the wisdom of an expert crowd. The emphasis on the word expert is intentional. A number of studies have shown that you can predict market movement via social media posts and sentiment. Captain believes you can make this even better by focusing on not just every post that mentions a stock but on posts from the set of experienced traders that make up our analysts.

If you’re interested in alert performance specifically, our @CaptainAlerts private Twitter (available to all Pro plan members) regularly puts out performance metrics of biggest winners and losers since we alerted for the stock for various time frames.

Remember, the examples below are strategies that can work but nothing is guaranteed in the market. Manage your risk, paper trade until you feel comfortable with your strategy, signals and brokerage setup and know when to walk away and cut losses.

Short Term

Use the Trends page or pre-market trending emails to identify what stocks are being talked about the most today. From this initial set, filter down a list you want to focus on using the bullish / bearish sentiment on Trends, based on commentary on the stock’s page (also available in SuperFeed details) and pair with your preferred technical or fundamental indicators.
Alternatively, rather than focusing on specific stocks you could make an analyst watchlist of your favorite traders that match your style and filter everything by that if you’d prefer more of a “follow trade” approach.
What’s the overall market doing today? Check our Fear & Greed and cross reference with index futures and $VIX. Don’t try to fight the market on a red day unless you have a very good reason to, even the best stocks can get pulled down.
Make a watchlist with your top stocks to focus on throughout the day.
Pull up the news gadget and filter it by your watchlist so you can zero in on any developments throughout the day.
Pull up the alerts gadget and set it to low threshold and either analyst or overall depending on what you think the best group to follow is based on your strategy. Low threshold is going to give you unusual conversation alerts earlier.
Pull up SuperFeed and filter by your watchlist so you can easily see the full conversations going on. News or alerts can be good triggers to check back in on SuperFeed if you don’t want to stay glued to it all day.
Trade your plan, take notes on what is working and what isn’t for you, refine, rinse and repeat.

Long Term

Your initial screen here can really vary widely since there are so many different longer term strategies to employ. If you don’t have a list of stocks from another source we highly recommend exploring the Captain analysts to try to find some that match your strategy (or look at pre-built Captain categories available in all the filter dropdowns across the site) and building an analyst watchlist. Turn on daily email summaries (analyst watchlists are at the bottom of this page) for this watchlist so you can track what stocks they’re talking about over time. You’re not necessarily in a hurry here to get into positions so watch the stocks they talk about ebb and flow over time.
Alternatively you might dive into congressional trades or insider trades (unusual insider trades are near the top of the Trends page, stock specific ones are on that stock’s page, search for any ticker at the very top to go to that stock’s page) to try to find some interesting plays that might not be on your radar otherwise.
Load your watchlist into Trends and using the filters adjust the time frame out to 7 days to get a bigger picture look at what’s being talked about.
Look at the conversation over much longer periods of time with Currents. You can load in a watchlist or manually enter tickers to visualize. Here’s an example of what growth investors we track have been talking about over the past six months.
Look at what setups the chartists are posting with Chart Explorer. This can help show you if stocks you’re looking at might be in a buy zone.
As you add positions to your portfolio, keep a stock watchlist of everything in your portfolio and turn on Daily Rundown emails. These daily summaries include news, price / volume, unusual volume and insider / congressional trades. This helps you keep tabs on what is happening in your positions even if you don’t open your broker’s app or the news that day so you can feel confident that you’re not missing anything (without the stress and hassle of refreshing things 100 times a day).
Trade your plan, take notes on what is working and what isn’t for you, refine, rinse and repeat.