Stock Message Boards: A Quantitative Approach to Measuring Investor Sentiment

Description

New media is playing an important role in the financial world. Rapid growth in stock market message boards, chat rooms, and other electronic means for investors to share market information makes clear the ever-increasing demand for online stock trading. In addition to an increasing number of related sites and apps, growth in the number of investors participating has exploded. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are especially interested in tracking the activities on stock market message boards in order to protect market credibility.Stock Message Boards provides empirical data to reveal how online communication not only impacts stock returns, but also volatility, trading volume, and liquidity, as well as a firm's value and reputation. Zhang demonstrates the long-term value of stock market message boards by using simple mathematics and statistics to show readers how to measure message board activities. This work argues that online message boards are more effective for small capitalization stocks than large capitalization stocks, and more prominent for financially-distressed firms than financially-sound firms.