I am working on a Twitter app that consumes tweets related to stocks. My code can use the streaming API to track individual stock names, such as $aapl, with no problem. I'd like to gather all references to stocks, so I'm trying to use the $ character as the filter string. I would then parse out only the tweets that have a valid $[stockname] included. When I create a statuses/filter connection with the predicate of just $, I get tweets with the $ followed by a space or a number, but never followed by an alpha character. Is this a bug, or as designed? Is it possible to have the API return tweets with $ followed by any characters?
The only other alternative I can see is setting up a filter connection with all stock names preceded by $, but that will require more track keywords than allowed in the default rate.
