Valuable Information in Early Sales Proxies : The Use of Google Search Ranks in Portfolio Optimization

We extract information on relative shopping interest from Google search volume and provide a genuine and economically meaningful approach to directly incorporate this data into a portfolio optimization technique. By generating a firm ranking based on a Google search volume metric, we can predict future sales and thus generate excess returns in a portfolio exercise. The higher the (shopping) search volume for a firm the higher we rank the company in the optimization process. For a sample of firms in the fashion industry, our results demonstrate that shopping interest exhibits predictive content which can be exploited in a real‐time portfolio strategy yielding robust Alphas around 5.5%