Is All that Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards

Literally millions of messages have been posted on internet stock message boards. Financial press reports claim that these postings can move markets. We study message posting on Yahoo! Finance and Raging Bull for the firms that were in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Internet Commerce Index during the year 2000. Using computional linguistics methods we measure the bullishness of the messages. Significant predictive content was found between message posting and trading volume, between message posting and volatility, between the degree of bullishness of the messages and trading volume. These results were obtained even after taking news stories from the Wall Street Journal into account