This new capability puts an array of consumer sentiment and brand enthusiasm in the hands of retail investors in the thinkorswim trading platform.

Tracking social media sentiment and volume of brand mentions may help investors discern trends, as well as offer potential clues into a company’s sales distribution. Wall Street analysts run channel checks for insights into sales heading into company earnings reports and same-store sales numbers. But what about Main Street? In an effort to level the playing field for retail investors, this new capability allows traders to view social data trends at the product level, review potential changes up to the past three years and visualize it in a chart showing the frequency of social posts.

The new third-party research capabilities are the result of an ongoing collaboration with social data firm LikeFolio, which is highly regarded in the industry to be at the forefront of utilizing social media data. In 2015, TD Ameritrade worked with LikeFolio to integrate social data into the research offering in the flagship TD Ameritrade platform. Based on the success and learnings of that launch, the companies worked to modify the offering to meet the needs of the traders using thinkorswim.

“Social analytics are not new to fintech,” said Nicole Sherrod, managing director of trading, TD Ameritrade. “But this lens is. This lens does not focus on what investors are saying about a stock in social media. It focuses on what consumers are saying about the products that the company makes. And like all capabilities in thinkorswim, the aperture on this lens is customizable. Traders can analyze what people think of a core brand in the company portfolio or they can look at a roll up of all the brands.”

“When traders think about social data, they think about LikeFolio,” said Landon Swan, LikeFolio’s founder. “And when they think of innovation in brokerage, they think of TD Ameritrade. It’s only natural that our firms continue to work together toward empowering individual investors with powerful social data. With this release on thinkorswim, we’re taking the first major step toward giving traders a unique data feature that you simply cannot get through any other source.”

Previously there has not been a concise way to gather social sentiment and easily turn it into research to use for investing. Now clients can chart how many mentions of a product or service happen over social media. This is not just one investor saying something specific about a publicly traded company; this analyzes mentions in social media of everything that the company offers. To make this data even more relevant, mentions are analyzed and tagged for sentiment, so investors can see if mentions about a given company are trending negatively or positively. Even more granularly, investors can filter mentions that are related to any given division of a company. For example, if a Park & Resort company also makes movies, investors can see all of the mentions that are related to just the movies.