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November 20: Building a Retail Equity Trading Model Using Social Media Posts

This month Art Steinmetz returns to talk about building an equity trading model.

Thank you to NYU for hosting us.

Everybody attending must RSVP through the registration form at nyhackr. There is a charge for in-person and virtual tickets are free.

Space is extremely limited and in-person registration closes at 3 PM the day of the talk.

About the Talk:We examine a publicly available dataset of over 100 million social media postings about stocks between 2010 and 2022 to identify users who made statistically valid predictions about future stock performance. We find that a tiny fraction of users make statistically valid predictions, though they are often wrong. There is as much value in predictably bad performance as good performance. We go on to build a trading strategy that a small retail stock trader could implement based on these findings.

From a data science perspective, this is interesting because we use the R package, "Duckplyr" and DuckDB to quickly and efficiently manipulate a multi-gigabyte data set either on a local disk or from an Amazon AWS S3 bucket. The project was inspired by this paper, "StockTwits: Comprehensive records of a financial social media platform from 2008 to 2022" by Li, X., Al Ansari, N., & Kaufman, A. (2025).

About Art:Currently, I am a private investor located in New York City and an angel investor in several startups including:

  1. Tifin AI for wealth management.

  2. Market Reader Understand markets in real time.

  3. Stronghold Payment and financial infrastructure for all.

  4. Launchpoint Advanced air mobility.

Additionally, I serve on the board of the Blackrock fixed income funds and do consulting for an enterprise data science firm, Posit PBC. I occasionally publish recreational data science projects at outsiderdata.blog. I am a member of the Economic Club of New York.I only consider investment introductions from my established network. Unsolicited inquiries will be politely ignored.

The venue doors open at 6:30 PM America/New_York where we will continue enjoying pizza together (we encourage the virtual audience to have pizza as well). The talk, and livestream, begins at 7:00 PM America/New_York.

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