The Effect of Online Investor Sentiment on Stock Movements: An LSTM Approach

Abstract

With more and more investors exerting their voices through network forums or social media platforms, the relationships between online investor sentiment and stock movements have drawn more and more attention. In this paper, we crawl stock comments from China’s most popular online stock forum, East Money (www.eastmoney.com), and then develop a sentiment classifier using the LSTM method. Using the online investor sentiment of the stock forum, we explore the effect of online investor sentiment on the stock movements of CSI300. The results show that online investor sentiment has a significant positive impact on both stock return and trading volume and remains significant after controlling book-to-market ratio, BETA, and market value. Moreover, investor sentiment has a significant positive impact on order imbalance of big trade, which represents the main flow of money in the market. As a result, investor sentiment has a positive impact on the major fund flows in the market. In other words, an increase in investor sentiment can boost the major money flows in the market to some extent. From a practical point of view, investor sentiment can assist investors to make investment decisions and help the government to regulate the stock market.