Competition between Online Stock Message Boards in Predictive Power: Focused on Multiple Online Stock Message Boards

This research aims to examine the predictive power of multiple online stock message boards, namely, NAVER Finance and PAXNET, which are the most popular stock message boards in South Korea, in stock market activities. If predictive power exists, we then compare the predictive power of multiple online stock message boards. To accomplish the research purpose, we constructed a panel data set with close price, volatility, Spell out acronyms at first mention.PER, and number of posts in 40 companies in three months, and conducted a panel vector auto-regression analysis. The analysis results showed that the number of posts could predict stock market activities. In NAVER Finance, previous number of posts positively influenced volatility on the day. In PAXNET, previous number of posts positively influenced close price, volatility, and PER on the day. Second, we confirmed a difference in the prediction power for stock market activities between multiple online stock message boards. This research is limited by the fact that it only considered 40 companies and three stock market activities. Nevertheless, we found correlation between online stock message board and stock market activities and provided practical implications. We suggest that investors need to focus on specific online message boards to find interesting stock market activities.