Reddit Sentiment VS Stock Price

Overall, this project was meant test the relationship between social media posts and their short-term effect on stock prices. We decided to use Reddit posts from financial specific subreddit communities like r/wallstreetbets, r/investing, and r/stocks to see the changes in the market associated with a variety of posts made by users. This idea came to light because of the GameStop short squeeze that showed the power of social media in the market. Typically, stock prices should purely represent the total present value of all the future value of the company, but the question we are asking is whether social media can impact that intrinsic value. Our research question was known from the start and it was do Reddit posts for or against a certain stock provide insight into how the market will move in a short window. To solve this problem, we selected five large tech companies including Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These companies would likely give us more data in the subreddits and would have less volatility day to day allowing us to simulate an experiment easier. They trade at very high values so a change from a Reddit post would have to be significant giving us proof that there is an effect.

Next, we had to choose our data sources for to have data to test with. First, we tried to locate the Reddit data using a Reddit API, but due to circumstances regarding Reddit requiring approval to use their data we switched to a Kaggle dataset that contained metadata from Reddit. For our second data set we had planned to use Yahoo Finance through yfinance, but due to the large amount of data we were pulling from this public API our IP address was temporarily blocked. This caused us to switch our second data to pull from Alpha Vantage. While this was a large switch in the public it was a minor roadblock and fixing the Finance pulling section allowed for everything else to continue to work in succession. Once we had both of our datasets programmatically pulled into our local vs code, we implemented a pipeline to clean, merge, and analyze all the data. At the end, we implement a Snakemake workflow to ensure the project was easily reproducible. To continue, we utilized Textblob to label our Reddit posts with a sentiment value of positive, negative, or neutral and provide us with a correlation value to analyze with. We then matched the time frame of each post with the stock data and computed any possible changes, found a correlation coefficient, and graphed our findings.

To conclude the data analysis, we found that there is relatively small or no correlation between the total companies, but Microsoft and Google do show stronger correlations when analyzed on their own. However, this may be due to other circumstances like why the post was made or if the market had other trends on those dates already. A larger analysis with more data from other social media platforms would be needed to conclude for our hypothesis that there is a strong correlation.