Social interactions in short squeeze scenarios

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between the intent dimension of social media postings and stock metrics such as trading volume and returns. Thereby, the paper contributes to the literature that studies the short squeeze phenomenon around GameStop focusing on textual sentiment. I use data from December 2020 to September 2021 and a vector autoregression model framework to study the connection between investor intent, textual sentiment, and stock metrics. I find that strong appeal of potential investors to hold onto investments significantly reduces stock volume in the short term. Higher sentiment lead to an increase in trading volume across several stocks. These findings indicate that observations made on the GameStop stock generalize to other stocks. Investor intent in social media postings can significantly impact stock markets.