Predicting Stock Market Movement Using Machine Learning : Through r/wallstreetbets sentiment & Google Trends, Herding versus Wisdom of Crowds

Sammanfattning: Stock market analysis is a hot-button topic, especially with the growth of online communities surrounding trading and investment. The goal of this paper is to examine the sentiment of r/wallstreetbets and the Google Trends score for a number of stocks – and then understanding whether the herding nature of investors on r/wallstreetbets is better at predicting the movement of the stock market than the WOC nature of Google Trends scores. Some combination of the herding and WOC values will also be used in predicting stock market fluctuations. Analysis will be done through the machine learning algorithms RFC and MLP. Through the mean and median precisions presented by the different machine learning algorithms the effectiveness of the predictor can be understood. This paper finds no real connection between either r/wallstreetbets sentiment or Google Trends data regarding predicting stock value fluctuations – with r/wallstreetbets yielding approximately 51%-52% mean precision depending on the machine learning algorithm used, and Google Trends precisions sitting at around 51%. The combination of r/wallstreetbets data and Google Trends data did not produce any significantly higher precision either, being between 51%-52%.