ANALYSIS OF UNSTRUCTURED SOCIAL MEDIA DATA: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON THE WALLSTREETBETS SUBREDDIT

Several economic online newspaper articles between May and June 2021 blamed the sudden changes in share prices of some listed companies on the influence of social media. In this research, through text analysis, it is verified and confirmed that from the approximately eight hundred thousand comments extracted using the API wrapper PRAW of the WallStreetBets subreddit general discussions, such as "Daily Discussion Thread", "What Are Your Moves Tomorrow", "Weekend Discussion Thread", a strong interest from users emerges towards the aforementioned companies as they are highly cited. The growing increase in this interest is also accompanied by the increase in the sense of belonging to the group of redditors which could have given rise to the organization of collective actions. From the sentiment analysis on a daily basis using the dictionary-based method, it turns out that as the positivity of users’ sentiment increases, the returns of the most mentioned stocks increase and vice versa.