Return prediction or investor manipulation? Recommendations of non-professional analysts and stock price movement

We examine article, author and firm characteristics of investment articles published by non-professional analysts on the social media investment platform Seeking Alpha from 2006 to 2020 leading to visible market value changes. We show that there are differences between articles followed by stock price changes in the short-term and articles predicting the long-term value of companies. Our results suggest that the market does not perfectly process the information provided through these articles and investors are influenced by text characteristics and visual depictions. However, most of these text characteristics are unimportant for articles focusing on long-term market price predictions. Instead, articles predicting long-term performance focus more on content-related characteristics