After a boisterous start to the week, fresh warnings of a slower global economy have pushed U.S. benchmarks on their backfoot. Even the great stocks are surpassing levels of near-term sensibility.

Companies including Verizon, Coca-Cola and Starbucks have either halted or plan to pause all social media advertising because platforms have “failed to stop the spread of hate.”

We emphasize to our traders that sometimes you’re able to receive breaking trading news from Twitter tweets and worldwide news networks before the trading squawk boxes and financial news television report the story.

Most trading news is irrelevant. Too much effort is spent scrolling irrelevant trade headlines, but only the top futures traders know what to ignore. This article shows traders some basic Tweetdeck filters for breaking news that impacts markets.

Tweetdeck is one of the fastest and most advanced news streamers designed for active traders. Traders use news services to get a jump on other traders as the story circulates through the different types of media.

Traders were glued to Twitter waiting for any news release from Donald Trump. Twitter has become a more reliable source of breaking news.

Facebook lost about $119 billion of its value on Thursday, marking the biggest one-day loss in U.S. market history. The company's shares plunged $41.24, or almost 19%, to $176.26 a day after the social media giant reported disappointing results. The slide is the largest decline in market capitalization in history, exceeding Intel's $91 billion single-day loss in September 2000, according to Bloomberg data.

Twitter’s stock price dropped by more than 10% after Bloomberg reported that the Israeli government is considering legal actions against the American social media company.

The goal in trading is to get ahead of the herd. It’s best to anticipate what’s going to happen in the next five to 60 days and focus on major events. Is the top analyst going to upgrade a stock before earnings? Will global macro traders try to position hawkish or dovish around the next FOMC statement? Will the next crop report show more supply or demand? These are the questions; the answers to which will move markets.

Social media is no longer just a social phenomenon, it is a large and growing market sector. Social media stocks can be exciting and profitable to trade, but require more analysis to separate the wheat from the chaff. Three charts, covering eleven stocks over the period November 2016 through October 2017, will show the different characteristics of each stock – supporting conclusions for those that might provide profitable trading opportunities and others that should probably be avoided.