Abstract

We study the informativeness of the sentiment of posts on Australia's largest online stock message board, HotCopper. We explore whether disagreements among sentiment form a signal about the fundamental news of a company. We find that positive sentiment is associated with noise induced (uniformed) trading whereas negative sentiment contains value-relevant information about a firm's performance. Our empirical findings suggest that short selling activity reduces overreactions of abnormal returns in a noisy environment on the same day. Furthermore, we observe a sentiment convergence pattern around annual earnings announcements and low levels of sentiment homogeneity relate to significantly lower annual earnings surprise. This supports the view that disagreements among sentiments are a signal of bad news about firm fundamentals.

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