Crowds on Wall Street: Extracting Value from Social Investing Platforms

For decades, the world of financial advisors has been dominated by large investment banks such as Goldman Sachs. In recent years, user-contributed investment services such as SeekingAlpha and StockTwits have grown to millions of users. In this paper, we seek to understand the quality and impact of content on social investment platforms, by empirically analyzing complete datasets of SeekingAlpha articles (9 years) and StockTwits messages (4 years). We develop sentiment analysis tools and correlate contributed content to the historical performance of relevant stocks. While SeekingAlpha articles and StockTwits messages provide minimal correlation to stock performance in aggregate, a subset of authors contribute more valuable (predictive) content. We show that these authors can be identified via both empirical methods or by user interactions, and investments using their analysis significantly outperform broader markets. Finally, we conduct a user survey that sheds light on users views of SeekingAlpha content and stock manipulation.