Stock Returns and the Tone of Marketplace Information: Does Context Matter?

The author provides empirical evidence that marketplace context matters for understanding stock price behavior. Investor sentiment, as measured by the informational tone of stock market reports from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News outlets, is compared across 2 classification dictionaries: the Harvard General Inquirer IV-4 dictionary and the financial context-specific dictionary of Loughran and McDonald [2011]. Empirical analyses find a negative relationship between measures of investor pessimism and real stock returns. However, this relationship is strongest and statistically significant only for the context-specific measures. The results suggest that investor sentiment based on contextualized information is able to explain medium- to longer-term swings in aggregate stock prices. This, in turn, implies that investor interpretation of stock market information may not unfold in mechanical ways.