Nov 18, 2021 - Economy

Fintwits goes mainstream

Kia Kokalitcheva

Illustration of the Twitter bird with a hundred dollar bill in its beak. — Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Finding meaning in your Twitter feed’s trove of snark and deep thoughts about public companies is hard. S&P Global is here to help.

Driving the news: S&P is partnering with Twitter to create a new index series that will track company sentiment — as told through tweets.

Why it matters: If you’ve ever wondered whether Twitter matters, now the king of indices is telling us it really does.

Details: The S&P 500 Twitter Sentiment Index Series, based on the classic S&P 500 Index, will apply a sentiment scoring model to bullish and bearish tweets containing Twitter “$cashtags” (those are Twitter tags of stock ticker symbols).

How it works: One index will measure the market-cap-weighted performance of 200 of the S&P 500 constituents with the highest sentiment scores.

Another will measure the equal-weighted performance of 50 of the constituents with the highest scores.

Go deeper: The indices will analyze tweets in real time. Filters will be applied, to screen out spam tweets (sorry, Twitter trolls).

The bottom line: This is Fintwits’ biggest endorsement to date.

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Fintwits goes mainstream

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