How To Trade Stocks Using Blogger Sentiment

As a shorthand for current or potential trends, sentiment is a great gut check on how various segments of the stock market ecosystem are feeling on a particular stock. While sentiment from professional analysts, through ratings, price targets or notes, appeals to traders’ sense of authoritative opinion, there is a massive and growing spectrum of quantified and aggregated sentiment from other sources that some traders have either been unable to reliably track or simply overlooked as too scattershot.

These ad hoc stock outlooks come from anything from website traffic to social media mentions. However, one of the most long-running sources of non-analyst sentiment from the legion of stalwart financial bloggers. As opposed to analyst commentary, bloggers have the leniency to make more unorthodox calls, though they still need to back up their thesis with strong reasoning and a decent track record.

While some traders have managed to find one or two reliable financial bloggers they turn to for trading ideas, others have also found aggregate sites like TipRanks for a wide selection of armchair analyst opinion. For those looking for a general sense of how these bloggers are discussing high-profile equities trading research platform FinanceBoards has also provided traders with a Bloggers Ratings Widget.

The widget, shown below, collects the 30 top tickers used by the most popular bloggers on TipRanks. It then analyzes posts for whether each blogger is bullish or bearish on the stock and arrives at a rating, shown on the far right.