Identifying and Following Expert Investors in Stock Microblogs

Abstract

Information published in online stock investment message boards, and more recently in stock microblogs, is considered highly valuable by many investors. Previous work focused on aggregation of sentiment from all users. However, in this work we show that it is beneficial to distinguish expert users from non-experts. We propose a general framework for identifying expert investors, and use it as a basis for several models that predict stock rise from stock microblogging messages (stock tweets). In particular, we present two methods that combine expert identification and per-user unsupervised learning. These methods were shown to achieve relatively high precision in predicting stock rise, and significantly outperform our baseline. In addition, our work provides an in-depth analysis of the content and potential usefulness of stock tweets.