Rodney Dangerfield - The Father of Social Media Sentiment Analysis

When I was an undergrad at UCLA I had a horrible habit of staying up all night with friends, drinking Schaefer beer and eating Domino's while watching movies such as Caddyshack.  I gotta admit those were some of the best times. Cheap beer, good food and great friends. Of course, never did I think that anything other than bad hangovers would result from the experience.

I guess that's why I'm just a blogger and not a multi-gazillionaire.  You see, if I were paying better attention I would have noticed the wisdom in the words of the late Rodney Dangerfield.

That clip above wasn't the wisdom I was talking about. That was just funny.

Somewhere in the movie Rodney says "they're all buying, then sell, sell, sell!" It seems that the folks at Barchart.com, Inc. were also avid fans of Caddyshack. How else would they have come up with the idea of tracking company sentiment on social media as a means of determining which stock to buy and which to sell.

According to a Barchart press release, "researchers from Indiana University and the University of Manchester recently published findings that social media can have up to an 86.7% accuracy rate at predicting the market."  The Barchart product analyzes thousands of social media messages every second, compiling data that can be used for research, system development and real-time stock, futures and forex signal creation. The software instantly evaluates and generates trading signals based on the sentiment of investors using social media tools.

This product and the research behind it may be useful to banks relative to decisions and transaction that involve stock price such as merger and acquisition transactions.

Another example of the usefulness of social media.  But does it look good on you?