SNTMNT: Social Media Stock Market Trends

SNTMNT (read: sentiment) is an online tool that just might be able to predict stock prices, based on online sentiments towards AEX funds. It was founded by four Dutch entrepreneurs: Tim Harbes, Durk Kingma, Vincent van Leeuwen, and Kees van Nunen. The online sentiments are mainly aggregated from the emotions of 10.000 sources within social media, news sites, and blogs; which are scanned daily by SNTMNT in cooperation with Clip It (market leader in online and social media monitoring). 

However, please take note that the analysis that SNTMNT makes are not intended for trading purposes and should not be considered as an investment advice. As I quoted from their site “We strive to visualize this correlation as clear and accurately as possible and would like to stress that this information is only for information purposes. SNTMNT does neither provide investment consulting or investment brokerage nor the call of buying or selling stocks, forwards, futures, or any other form of financial derivatives.”

Apart from that, the forecast that SNTMNT makes can be accessed by everyone. There are so far 25 AEX funds whose overview can be seen on SNTMNT, such as: Air-France-KLM (AF), Akzo Nobel (AKZA), Heineken (HEIO), Philips (PHIA), Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), Unilever (UNA), etc. 

So what is the secret behind this tool? According to their site, they have “a machine learning algorithms”, which they say, can accurately predict the stock movements between 15 minutes and 7 days in the future. According to one of the founders, Vincent van Leeuwen on his interview on De Wereld Draait Door (Dutch talkshow), “We look for strange keywords that appear on Twitter and use that to smartly spot trends faster than what most of the traditional media do”.

^{Source: Vincent van Leeuwen on De Wereld Draait Door}

The way I see it, this tool can be a social media breakthrough in the financial segment for investors. Too bad it is only available for AEX; maybe it would be great if later SNTMNT could be upgraded to also be available for other big stock exchanges like NASDAQ, NYSE, TSE, and LSE.