Tweets predict Dow's performance.

• Position: Stock Market - Dow Jones Industrial Average - Brief article

Measurements of the collective public mood derived from millions of tweets can predict the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to a weak in advance with an accuracy approaching 90%, information scientists from Indiana University, Bloomington, have found. Researchers at the School of Informatics and Computing employed a pair of mood-tracking tools to analyze more than 9,800,000 tweets from 2,700,000 users during a 10-month period.

One tool, OpinionFinder, analyzed the tweets to provide a positive or negative daily time series of public mood. The second, Google-Profile of Mood States, measured the mood of tweets in six dimensions: calm, alert, sure, vital, kind, and happy. Together, the two tools provided the researchers with seven public mood time series that then could be set against a similar daily time series of Dow Jones closing values.

"We were not interested in proposing an optimal Dow Jones prediction...