How LikeFolio Predicted Good News For bebe stores

Andy Swan is a three-time financial technology entrepreneur. He co-founded his most recent company LikeFolio in 2013 with his brother.

LikeFolio finds trends in publicly-traded companies by analyzing social media and helps investors find companies they want to invest in by highlighting which ones they capture, post and tweet about the most.

Swan recently joined Benzinga’s #PreMarket Prep to talk about some of the unique things LikeFolio is finding with the social media data, including an indicator bebe stores, inc. BEBE earnings.

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LikeFolio Focused On Teen Retailers

Last November, Swan explained that his team started looking at the teen retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch Co. ANF, Aeropostale Inc ARO and, of course, bebe.

The team noticed that all of those companies were down compared to the year prior, in terms of both number of mentions on social media and sentiment users had toward them. Except for one: bebe.

“We noticed there that actually volumes were up. The number of people talking about purchase decisions at the stores was up and the overall sentiment was much higher than the rest of the group,” Swan said.

LikeFolio In Action

So, the LikeFolio team put out a note on that data and suggested that things may not be as bad for the stock as it looked, adding that it might be having a better-than-expected quarter.

Earlier this week, bebe reported an 8 percent gain in its same-store sales. Shares jumped almost 20 percent. Swan said it was cool to see the confirmation of the LikeFolio data.

“Not every piece of data is useful,” he said. “But when you can find a signal like that, which is what we aim to do — sort of outlier cases — there is value.”

Swan also talked about Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and Tesla Motors Inc TSLA.

Check out his full interview here:

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