Rumours built on quicksand: evidence on the nature and impact of message board postings in modern equity markets

Abstract

It is argued that internet-based short-sellers take advantage of asymmetric information, publishing research online which often values shares in a target company at a large discount to their current price. The increasing popularity of online dissemination of information, coupled with evidence that individuals are prone to behave in a herd-like fashion suggests the potential for significant volatility in the share price of a company. In this paper, a dataset of 12,616 financial message board postings is employed to examine patterns in online activity following the publication of a research note targeting a specific firm by an internetbased short seller. Identifiable trends in investor behaviour, indicative of community contagion, are shown with group sentiment shifting over time. The findings have implications for regulators' attempts to adapt to an online environment in which information-and misinformation-can be rapidly incorporated into share prices.

impact of cultural differences on LINE app communication among Thai and Chinese employees

“…Thai group result is a contradiction to the study made by Charoensukmongkol (2014), which showed that the use of social media aids employees in the performance of their job. This contradicting result indicates that messenger apps are now used to be a venue in which people at work exchange rumors and gossip, which may malign the workers' intention of completing their respective job assignments (Bowden et al, 2018). Exchanging information about one's personal whereabouts or sharing some mundane personal news over messenger apps have become disruptive at work since it is time-consuming and distracting.…”

“…However, some other studies revealed that the use of messenger apps for personal use may malign the attainment of vigor, dedication and absorption as forms of employee engagement as this interrupts the process of delivering proper corporation communication. Bowden, Burton, and Power (2018) mentioned that there are a lot of people who are exposed to interactive text messages just to chat or exchange rumors and gossip, which are basically not important. Discussing personal whereabouts or sharing some mundane personal news have been common in instant messaging, if done in the workplace, this may disrupt the worker's performance of his job.…”

Narrative Economics

“…In defence of this view we can see some early fruit of the application of textual analysis to the analysis of financial markets (Boudoukh et al , 2019; Bowden et al , 2018; Nekrasov et al , 2020). I hope we can participate in the establishment of some rules of the road for examining textual data to unravel and employ important economic narratives as part of our investment management process.…”

Specifying and validating overconfidence bias among retail investors: a formative index

“…Previous research studies primarily concentrated on defining the aspects of behavioral biases like herding (Qasim et al, 2019;Bowden et al, 2018), disposition effect (Trejos et al, 2019) and OB (Paisarn et al, 2021). However, there is a dearth of research on investigating diverse determinants constituting OB of retail investors (Rasool and Ullah, 2020).…”