PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Google searches hold key to future market crashes

2014-07-28
(Press-News.org) A team of researchers from Warwick Business School and Boston University have developed a method to automatically identify topics that people search for on Google before subsequent stock market falls.

Applied to data between 2004 and 2012, the method shows that increases in searches for business and politics preceded falls in the stock market. The study, 'Quantifying the semantics of search behavior before stock market moves,' was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers suggest that this method could be applied to help identify warning signs in search data before a range of real world events.

"Search engines, such as Google, record almost everything we search for," said Chester Curme, Research Fellow at Warwick Business School and lead author of the study. "Records of these search queries allow us to learn about how people gather information online before making decisions in the real world. So there's potential to use these search data to anticipate what large groups of people may do.

"However, the number of possible things people could search for is huge. So an important challenge is to identify what types of words may be relevant to behaviours of interest."

In previous studies, Curme and his colleagues, Tobias Preis and Suzy Moat of Warwick Business School, and H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University, have demonstrated that usage data from Google and Wikipedia may contain early warning signs of stock market moves. However, these findings relied on the researchers choosing an appropriate set of keywords, in particular those related to finance.

In order to enable algorithms to automatically identify patterns in search activity that might be related to subsequent real world behaviour, the team quantified the meaning of every single word on Wikipedia. This allowed the researchers to categorize words into topics, so that a "business" topic may contain words such as "business", "management", and "bank". The algorithm identified a broad selection of topics, ranging from food to architecture to cricket.

The team then used Google Trends to see how often each week thousands of these words were searched for by Internet users in the United States between 2004 and 2012. By using these search activity datasets in a simple trading strategy for the S&P 500, they found that changes in how often users searched for terms relating to business and politics could be connected to subsequent stock market moves.

"By mining these datasets, we were able to identify a historic link between rises in searches for terms for both business and politics, and a subsequent fall in stock market prices," said Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. "No other topic was linked to returns that were significantly higher than those generated by randomly buying and selling. The finding that political terms were of use in our trading strategies, as well as more obvious financial terms, provides evidence that valuable information may be contained in search engine data for keywords with less obvious semantic connections to events of interest. Our method provides a new approach for identifying such keywords."

Moat continued, "Our results are in line with the hypothesis that increases in searches relating to both politics and business could be a sign of concern about the state of the economy, which may lead to decreased confidence in the value of stocks, resulting in transactions at lower prices."

"Our results provide evidence of a relationship between the search behaviour of Google users and stock market movements," said Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance at Warwick Business School. "However, our analysis found that the strength of this relationship, using this very simple weekly trading strategy, has diminished in recent years. This potentially reflects the increasing incorporation of Internet data into automated trading strategies, and highlights that more advanced strategies are now needed to fully exploit online data in financial trading."

"We believe that follow-up analyses incorporating data at a finer time granularity, or using other types of online data, could shed light on how the relationships we uncover have evolved in time," said Curme.

Curme added, "While our investigation used stock market movements as a case study, these methods could in principle be applied to create predictive models for a wide range of other events."

INFORMATION: A copy of the paper is available from the authors.

To speak to one of the study authors: Suzy Moat, Suzy.Moat@wbs.ac.uk, +44 7989 320018, Tobias Preis, mail@tobiaspreis.de, +44 7530 322615 or Chester Curme, ccurme@bu.edu, +1 781 7603645


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Memory relies on astrocytes, the brain's lesser known cells

Memory relies on astrocytes, the brains lesser known cells
2014-07-28
VIDEO: Salk scientists have discovered the link between astrocytes and memory. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA—When you're expecting something—like the meal you've ordered at a restaurant—or when something captures your interest, unique electrical rhythms sweep through your brain. These waves are called gamma oscillations and they reflect a symphony of cells—both excitatory and inhibitory—playing together in an orchestrated way. Though their role has been debated, ...

Scientists discover genetic switch that can prevent peripheral vascular disease in mice

Scientists discover genetic switch that can prevent peripheral vascular disease in mice
2014-07-28
Millions of people in the United States have a circulatory problem of the legs called peripheral vascular disease. It can be painful and may even require surgery in serious cases. This disease can lead to severe skeletal muscle wasting and, in turn, limb amputation. At The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School, scientists tested a non-surgical preventative treatment in a mouse model of the disease and it was associated with increased blood circulation. Their proof-of-concept study appears in the journal Cell Reports. Unlike ...

Mineral magic? Common mineral capable of making and breaking bonds

Mineral magic? Common mineral capable of making and breaking bonds
2014-07-28
TEMPE, Ariz. - Reactions among minerals and organic compounds in hydrothermal environments are critical components of the Earth's deep carbon cycle, they provide energy for the deep biosphere, and may have implications for the origins of life. However, very little is known about how minerals influence organic reactions. A team of researchers from Arizona State University have demonstrated how a common mineral acts as a catalysts for specific hydrothermal organic reactions – negating the need for toxic solvents or expensive reagents. At the heart of organic chemistry, ...

Forced mutations doom HIV

2014-07-28
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Fifteen years ago, MIT professor John Essigmann and colleagues from the University of Washington had a novel idea for an HIV drug. They thought if they could induce the virus to mutate uncontrollably, they could force it to weaken and eventually die out — a strategy that our immune system uses against many viruses. The researchers developed such a drug, which caused HIV to mutate at an enhanced rate, as expected. But it did not eliminate the virus from patients in a small clinical trial reported in 2011. In a new study, however, Essigmann and colleagues ...

Tennessee Surgical Quality Collaborative saves 533 lives and $75 million in 3 years

2014-07-28
NEW YORK (July 28, 2:45 pm [ET]): Ten hospitals in the Tennessee Surgical Quality Collaborative (TSQC) have reduced surgical complications by 19.7 percent since 2009, resulting in at least 533 lives saved and $75.2 million in reduced costs, according to new results presented today at the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) National Conference in New York City. The hospital collaborative was formed in 2008 as a partnership of the Tennessee Chapter of the American College of Surgeons and the Tennessee Hospital Association's ...

Stimulation of brain region restores consciousness to animals under general anesthesia

2014-07-28
Stimulating one of two dopamine-producing regions in the brain was able to arouse animals receiving general anesthesia with either isoflurane or propofol. In the August issue of Anesthesiology, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) report that rats anesthetized with continuous doses of either agent would move, raise their heads and even stand up in response to electrical stimulation delivered to the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Stimulation of the other major dopamine-releasing area, the substantia nigra, did not induce the animals to wake up. "Dopamine ...

Study suggests disruptive effects of anesthesia on brain cell connections are temporary

2014-07-28
A study of juvenile rat brain cells suggests that the effects of a commonly used anesthetic drug on the connections between brain cells are temporary. The study, published in this week's issue of the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York in response to concerns, arising from multiple studies on humans over the past decade, that exposing children to general anesthetics may increase their susceptibility to long-term cognitive and behavioral deficits, such as learning disabilities. An ...

UTSW cancer researchers identify irreversible inhibitor for KRAS gene mutation

UTSW cancer researchers identify irreversible inhibitor for KRAS gene mutation
2014-07-28
DALLAS – July 28, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers have found a molecule that selectively and irreversibly interferes with the activity of a mutated cancer gene common in 30 percent of tumors. The molecule, SML-8-73-1 (SML), interferes with the KRAS gene, or Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog. The gene produces proteins called K-Ras that influence when cells divide. Mutations in K-Ras can result in normal cells dividing uncontrollably and turning cancerous. These mutations are particularly found in cancers of the lung, pancreas, and colon. ...

Stress-tolerant tomato relative sequenced

Stress-tolerant tomato relative sequenced
2014-07-28
The genome of Solanum pennellii, a wild relative of the domestic tomato, has been published by an international group of researchers including the labs headed by Professors Neelima Sinha and Julin Maloof at the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology. The new genome information may help breeders produce tastier, more stress-tolerant tomatoes. The work, published July 27 in the journal Nature Genetics, was lead by Björn Usadel and colleagues at Aachen University in Germany. The UC Davis labs carried out work on the transcriptome of S. pennellii — the RNA molecules that are ...

Researchers discover cool-burning flames in space, could lead to better engines on earth

Researchers discover cool-burning flames in space, could lead to better engines on earth
2014-07-28
A team of international researchers has discovered a new type of cool burning flames that could lead to cleaner, more efficient engines for cars. The discovery was made during a series of experiments on the International Space Station by a team led by Forman Williams, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers detailed their findings recently in the journal Microgravity Science and Technology. "We observed something that we didn't think could exist," Williams said. A better understanding of the cool flames' ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Mandatory standards for the indoor environment would result in immense benefits to the health and productivity of people around the world

Chickadees have unique neural “barcodes” for memories of stashing away food

Chickadees are memory geniuses. Their barcode-like neural activity may be to thank

Tiny orchid flowers pollinated by tiny flies

Researchers develop AI-based tool paving the way for personalized cancer treatments

Reports of COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in predominantly republican vs democratic states

Patient out-of-pocket costs for biologic drugs after biosimilar competition

New Brigham research highlights combining prostate MRI with a blood test to avoid unnecessary prostate biopsies

Scientists discover a key quality-control mechanism in DNA replication

Lipids with potential health benefits in herbal teas

Synergically improved energy storage performance and stability in sol–gel processed BaTiO3/(Pb,La,Ca)TiO3/BaTiO3 tri-layer films with a crystalline engineered sandwich structure

International collaboration enabled participatory stock assessment on glass eel fisheries in West Java, Indonesia

Enhanced melanoma vaccine offers improved survival for men

Nearly one-third of patients with TBI have marginal or inadequate health literacy

Genetic causes of cerebral palsy uncovered through whole-genome sequencing

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

[Press-News.org] Google searches hold key to future market crashes