Research

2018

Challenge

Tesla, Trading, and Twitter

Creating a trading algorithm for Tesla stock based off Elon Musk's Twitter.

bees
Outcome
Additional
Details
We created a live sentiment analysis trading algorithm for Tesla that beat the market by 6%.
Created with a team of 4 (1 week)
Elon Musk's twitter began hitting the national media with a tweet saying he would make Tesla private if reaching $420 on August 7, 2018. We presented our algorithm at the Data Science Institute at UVA on June 4, 2018, two months prior to this tweet. By analyzing over 3,500 of Musk's tweets, we created sentiment analysis scores of his tweets to use as a basis of decision making for trading. We also factored in the retweets, favorites, and responses to his tweets to the algorithm as there was a positive correlation between tweet interactions and stock price.
When there's a huge jump in favorites/retweets for a given tweet, a large change usually occurs in the stock price.
When there's a huge jump in favorites/retweets for a given tweet, a large change usually occurs in the stock price.