The Google-curated Internet is full of sound and fury amounting to little, but the Twitterverse, it seems, knows what it is talking about.<br />That’s the upshot of two new investment studies which seek to use Google search and Twitter to inform trading strategies.<br />The first, from MIT, showed that measuring tweet sentiment on the day of Federal Open Market Committee meetings yields data which can be profitably used in trading.<br />Another, from Norway, using Google trends data, shows that high search interest in companies actually predicts low future returns in the following week, a finding in contrast to earlier similar papers.<br />It is, of course, not quite as simple as this, but the studies, part of a huge rush to invest profitably based on social media and Internet data, do tend to confirm Twitter’s reputation as a sort of insiders’ clubhouse, as opposed to Google’s more mass appeal.
