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January 17, 2011

TweetTrader Sentiment Reflecting News on Steve Jobs' Leave from Apple

On January 17th, 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking leave of absence from the company's day-to-day operations because of a medical condition, according to a letter Jobs sent to Apple employees. As a result, the stock has plummeted. The case is a good example of how TweetTrader.net instantly reflects market developments, often even before it hits major news wires. As you can see, TweetTrader.net Sentiment on $AAPL was down almost 30% and people were talking mostly about issues related to Corporate Governance (which, according to our research, is largely CEO-related) and Operations.

January 2, 2011

What Topics are Stock Microbloggers talking about?

We have investigated which topics are on the minds of stock microbloggers. We have classified thousands of tweets into the following news or event categories: Corporate Governance, Financial Issues, Operations, Restructuring Issues, Legal Issues, and Technical Trading. In addition, to allow for more granular analysis, we have defined subcategories for which we found a substantial number of messages among our data set (e.g., stock-related vs. market-related technical trading signals).
The table below provides an overview of the event categories and sample messages assigned to the respective class. It shows that technical trading signals are the most frequently mentioned event category with references in almost one third of all messages (34.0%), among which stock-related signals make up the vast majority (28.2%). Next are comments regarding company operations (20.3%), especially product development (9.4%), operational performance (4.2%) and marketing (4.2%). Financial issues come third as an event category (13.3%) with a majority of messages dedicated to the discussion of earnings results (6.9%). Restructuring issues (6.1%), Legal Issues (3.5%) and topics related to Corporate Governance (3.3%) are mentioned less frequently. The distribution of topics shows some interesting differences to professionally edited newspapers and confirms that stock microblogs provide information "off the beaten track".


You find the current share of topics for each stock in real-time on the TweetTrader Scoreboard: