The impact of US presidents on market returns: Evidence from Trump's tweets

Abstract

We analyze President Trump’s Twitter posts on the COVID-19 pandemic to quantitatively construct his sentiment proxy to examine its predictive power in industry-level equity returns. With the growing influence of social media, some “special” people have been able to use their celebrity status for wielding significant market influence, thereby causing a new modern crisis. This study parsed words from 2574 tweets from President Trump’s Twitter account to explore the predictive power of his sentiments on the US market during the pandemic. After controlling for rigorous factors, result shows that an industry-level negative tone in general content is unlikely to be predictive of stock returns. Furthermore, the consumer goods industry exhibited a negative return when Trump displayed a negative attitude toward the pandemic. Industries adversely affected by the pandemic because of travel restrictions, consumption shocks, and public health issues are statistically correlated with Trump’s negative tone on the pandemic.