Retail Attention
Our research finds that a novel measure of investor attention, derived using web traffic data collected by InvestingChannel from financial media publishers, can forecast earnings and revenue surprises for 4000+ public companies ahead of the market consistently throughout 2017-2020. We also predict earnings pre-announcement period returns, shown below.
Online investor attention data is collected from a network of over 150 financial media publishers globally, including many well-known media properties. This raw traffic data (per audience visit) is available from 2017 onwards, covering over 9,600 public companies in the U.S. alone.
We find that the data is predictive of earnings pre-announcement period returns. Specifically, firms in the top 20% by attention tend to report 2.1% larger earnings surprises, 0.5% larger revenue surprises, and 0.52% more in pre- announcement period returns than those in the bottom 20% by attention.