Trends with Benefits #46: Social Sentiment with Jamie Wise

02 March 2021

In this episode I welcome Jamie Wise, CEO of Periscope Capital and Founder of Buzz Holdings to discuss using social sentiment as an investment strategy.

Subscribe Now

Spotify |

Collective Conviction

Online platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Stocktwits and others have become destinations for people to share opinions and perceptions about stocks and investments. Every day there are millions of messages posted from people of different backgrounds and at different locations. Individuals with different experiences and perceptions help enhance the diversity of discussions and can be a rich source of information for prospective investors.

This type of information has in fact become an alternative data set. Professional investors like hedge funds, seeking a performance edge, have started scouring the data with sophisticated technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing to help sift through millions of posts to assess the broad consensus about a stock, the collective conviction.

Jamie is a hedge fund guy. He described the research work his team undertook that led to the creation of the BUZZ NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index in 2015. We chatted about how his index measures social sentiment, the style of investing such a strategy exhibits and the potential for sentiment to pick up not only on popular themes, but also to potentially identify contrarian or turn-around ideas.

Of course, a discussion about social sentiment and the power of individual investors in early 2021 wouldn’t be complete without a discussion about Reddit and GameStop. Jamie shares his thoughts about what this event demonstrated to the broader investment community.