Stock Searches: Not all searches are equal
Written by Matt Wainwright (contact - e-mail) -- September 4th, 2007 | Share - Save - E-mailIn a previous blog, we listed the 20 most heavily searched stocks during the bearish week of July 30. That analysis showed a lack of any statistically significant relationship between the number of searches on a given stock and the common financial measures of that stock, such as EPS or Beta. In that light, stock-search data provides a novel, “extra-transactional” measure that financial analysts may find valuable. But this would assume that all stock searches are the equal.
The 10 most heavily-searched stocks, listed by site, vary a bit from the aggregated top 20 list. This variation is more pronounced on sites like MarketWatch and CNN Money, than on Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money who, together, comprised 86% of the stock-searches that week. In fact 40% of all the stocks searched on MarketWatch were unique to the site. This was also true for Google Finance, but it is important to recall that 64% of the content viewed on that site was search related. Search content on MarkeWatch watch made-up only 13% of the site’s traffic for the week, and 15% of the traffic throughout July. Additionally, this traffic was provided by only 7% of all MarketWatch users.
MarketWatch users are a small, but distinguished group; their searches appear a less random than searches on other sites. On MarketWatch, the most heavily-searched stocks had distinctly lower per-share incomes and more conservative valuation than those on other sites. MarketWatch users also viewed more volatile stocks, but appeared unmoved by the trading volumes of those stocks. To further evaluate this unique, financial search data, it is important to note that each financial search engine may attract a different investing demographic. As such, the potential value of data from each of these search-engines cannot be weighed equally.
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