Follow the money: A study of cashtags on Twitter

Authors

  • Martin Hentschel Microsoft
  • Omar Alonso Microsoft

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i8.5385

Keywords:

social media, financial data, Twitter

Abstract

The popularity of Twitter goes beyond trending topics, world events, memes, and popular hashtags. Recently a new way of sharing financial information is taking place in social media under the name of cashtags, stock ticker symbols that are prefixed with a dollar sign. In this paper we present an exploratory analysis of cashtags on Twitter. Specifically, we investigate how widespread cashtags are, what stock symbols are tweeted more often, and which users tweet about cashtags in general. We analyze relationships among cashtags and study hashtags in the context of cashtags. Finally, we compare tweet performance to stock market performance. We conclude that cashtags, in particular in combination with other cashtags or hashtags, can be very useful for analyzing financial information and provide new insights into stocks and companies.

Author Biographies

Martin Hentschel, Microsoft

Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Bing

Omar Alonso, Microsoft

Senior Development Lead at Microsoft Bing

Downloads

Published

2014-08-10

How to Cite

Hentschel, M., & Alonso, O. (2014). Follow the money: A study of cashtags on Twitter. First Monday, 19(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i8.5385