Bull Bear Balance: A Cluster Analysis of Socially Informed Financial Volatility

Using a method rooted in information theory, we present results that have identified a large set of stocks for which social media can be informative regarding financial volatility. By clustering stocks based on the joint feature sets of social and financial variables, our research provides an important contribution by characterizing the conditions in which social media signals can lead financial volatility. The results indicate that social media is most informative about financial market volatility when the ratio of bullish to bearish sentiment is high, even when the number of messages is low. The robustness of these findings is verified across 500 stocks from both NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges. The reported results are reproducible via an open-source library for social-financial analysis made freely available.