by pdwp90
Background
/r/WallStreetBets (WSB) is a community on Reddit where participants discuss stock and option trading. Every day, WallStreetBets has a “Tomorrow’s Moves” where community members talk about what trades they are planning on making the next trading day.
Methodology
I wrote a Python script to collect a sample of around 3,000 comments from every “Tomorrow’s Moves” thread I could find, which gave me data going back to August 2018. I then used Python to count the number of uses of the words “puts”, “put”, “calls”, and “call”. These counts were normalized by user, in order to control for people spamming words. If you’re not familiar, “call options” are generally associated a bullish mentality (you think the market will go up), whereas “put options” are generally associated a bearish mentality. This is a massive simplification, but the general idea is that by comparing the number of mentions of “calls” with the number of mentions of “puts” we could create a proxy measure for the sentiment of the subreddit.
Data Source: /r/WallStreetBets comments
Tools: Python