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Is There a Free Lunch? Examining the Value of Free Content on Equity Review Platforms

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Digital Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities (WEB 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 328))

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Abstract

Planning and advising for financial investment used to be the domain dominated by highly specialized financial analysts. However technological advancements seem to have disrupted this market to a point where free financial investment advice is now available on a variety of web and social media platforms such as amateur investors forums and specialized equity review websites. Since contributors on these platforms vary in terms of their motivation and expertise, we are yet to understand the value of free financial advice available on these platforms. In this research, we focus on the largest equity review website in the US and examine the value of free financial advice available on this platform. Our results simulate the investment using contributors’ ideas on S&P 500 listed companies. Our results show that trading based on free financial advice yields good returns on investment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Tianyou Hu & Arvind Tripathi

Authors
  1. Tianyou Hu
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  2. Arvind Tripathi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tianyou Hu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Seoul, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Wooje Cho

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ming Fan

  3. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Michael J. Shaw

  4. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Byungjoon Yoo

  5. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Han Zhang

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Hu, T., Tripathi, A. (2018). Is There a Free Lunch? Examining the Value of Free Content on Equity Review Platforms. In: Cho, W., Fan, M., Shaw, M., Yoo, B., Zhang, H. (eds) Digital Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities. WEB 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 328. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99936-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99936-4_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99935-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99936-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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