Mood and the Market: Can Press Reports of Investors’ Mood Predict Stock Prices?

Authors

Yochi Cohen-Charash, CUNY Bernard M Baruch CollegeFollow
Charles A. Scherbaum, CUNY Bernard M Baruch CollegeFollow
John D. Kammeyer-Muller, University of Florida
Barry M. Staw, University of California, Berkeley

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-28-2013

Abstract

We examined whether press reports on the collective mood of investors can predict changes in stock prices. We collected data on the use of emotion words in newspaper reports on traders’ affect, coded these emotion words according to their location on an affective circumplex in terms of pleasantness and activation level, and created indices of collective mood for each trading day. Then, by using time series analyses, we examined whether these mood indices, depicting investors’ emotion on a given trading day, could predict the next day’s opening price of the stock market. The strongest findings showed that activated pleasant mood predicted increases in NASDAQ prices, while activated unpleasant mood predicted decreases in NASDAQ prices. We conclude that both valence and activation levels of collective mood are important in predicting trend continuation in stock prices.

Comments

This article originally appeared in PLOS ONE, available at DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0072031.

© 2013 Cohen-Charash et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.