Financial Anomalies in Social Media – Analyzing Potential Effects of Donald Trump’s Tweets on the Stock Market

Abstract: This paper examines the potential effects of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity on the stock market. This is investigated with different methods starting out with limiting Trump’s tweets into tweets including four potentially impactful keywords as well as classifying the tweets into different senti-ments. To further test the theory of the tweets possible effect on the market an event study was constructed for each keyword and respective sentiment. Although an impact has been suggested on company specific tweets no statistically significant effects of Trump’s tweets can be determined on the overall market, concluding that no beneficial trading possibilities or anomalies are found using the classifications and methods demonstrated in this paper. However, a few patterns can be discovered as well as a strong positive correlation between Trump’s weekly number of tweets about tariffs and Russian collusion and the weekly Google search activity for those two keywords. Further studies into smaller markets or other approaches may present more significant findings.