Let me inform you of the following research seminar.

Date: May 19 (Friday), 2023
Time: 5:15PM-6:45PM
Venue: 11th Floor, Bldg.No.2 Meeting Room A & ZOOM (HyFlex)
Speaker: Yoichi Otsubo (University of Manchester) 　
Organizer: Takuya Hasebe
Language: English

Title:
WallStreetBets Influencers and Intensity Bursts in Stock Trading

Abstract:
This paper studies the role of influencers and how they shape the investment landscape on Reddit, shedding light on the mechanisms through which investment ideas are communicated and the impact they have on investor behaviour. Using over 45 million submissions and comments posted on Reddit’s r\wallstreetbets, a financial contents focused sub forum, we construct influence measures based on: (i) the crowd drawing power based on the number of follow-up comments the original post has attracted; (ii) the degree of agreement, i.e. the proportion of follow-up comments that share the same sentiment as the original post; and (iii) the sentiment, i.e. the submitter’s original view about the market. Leveraging on these novel influence measures, we investigate a number of big names on the financial social media platform and check how these individuals gain the status of influencer, and the tactics they used to strengthen their influence. Finally, we test for intensity bursts among stock trading volumes and the corresponding contagious social media trends on Reddit. By applying intensity burst statistics, we find very close relationships between financial social media and the stock market. We will demonstrate that these intensity bursts also spilled over to the individual stock volatility bursts and their intraday drift bursts.

* Please contact the organizer via email, if you'd like to participate in the online seminar.
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