The Impact Of Internet Investment Forums On Personal Investment And Asset Pricing

The Internet is becoming the main way for people to get information.There are millions of investors have gathered on Social Trading Platforms,such as Xueqiu and Guba.They have formed a huge and complex social network for information exchanging,which will in turn affect the formation of human expectations and the investment decision process.Based on the huge social network,can the Social Trading Platforms increase their personal information and increase investment returns?For the asset pricing,can the platforms improve the market pricing efficiency?This is the core issue of this paper.On the basis of relevant literature and theories,this paper used Python to write a crawler program for data preparation.We obtained more than 360,000 users' 10 million pieces of mutual attention information from xueqiu.com,then mapped the social network between these users by Gephi;We also crawled more than 700,000 virtual portfolios on Xueqiu to know users' returns.The relationship between Social Trading Platforms and asset pricing was studied from a micro perspective and a macro perspective:First,from a micro level,the impact of Social Trading Platform on individual investment return was studied.Based on the efficient market hypothesis and the information asymmetry theory,the positive and negative effects of the platforms were theoretically analyzed.In order to describe the interaction between different nodes,this paper introduced the concept of "out degree"(source of information)and "centrality"to measure the difference in importance of different nodes in the social network,and The average centrality of a node's neighbors'was defined as "information quality".The research results show that:(1)Investors obtained information from neighbor nodes on the social network.The higher the average centrality of neighbor nodes,the more information investors get;(2)The "out degree" of investors had no significant effect on the amount of information,indicating that blindly paying attention to more users would not bring information gain to the users;(3)The increase in information quality and the amount of "out degree" had increased the level of personal returns;(4)The quantile regression results showed that the social network has heterogeneity in investors'information gain and income enhancement.The lower the return level,the higher the degree of benefit from the social network.Second,from a macro perspective,the impact of Social Trading Platform on asset returns was studied.This paper used the sentiment datas in CNRDS-GUBA database to construct the sentiment index and opinion divergence index.The study found that:(1)There was a positive correlation between the sentiment index and the asset return,and there was a negative relationship between the opinion divergence index and the return rate.(2)The DCC-GARCH model was used to study the dynamic change of the relationship between the sentiment index and asset returns.The research results showed that the postings volume was positively correlated with the correlation.Third,from a macro perspective,the impact of Social Trading Platform on asset pricing efficiency was studied.Based on the theoretical analysis,the Social Trading Platforms was thought improving the asset pricing efficiency.Referring to the previous scholars'definition of capital asset pricing efficiency,based on information entropy theory and stock price synchronicity,this paper difined efft_entropy and RSQ to measure pricing efficiency;finally,through empirical research on panel data,we found that the communication behavior on Social Trading Platform(posting,reading,and commenting)had all contributed to the improvement of asset pricing efficiencys.The main contributions of this paper were as follows:Firstly,a large-scale complex social network with 360,000 Internet users was constructed,and its impact on investors was empirically studied.Secondly,from a micro perspective,the impact of ISocial Trading Platform on individual investors was studied.There are few studies on micro perspectives.Thirdly,introduced the concept of information entropy,and defined a new index using entropy to asset pricing efficiency of the stock market.Through the above research,this paper believed that Social Trading Platform can play a important role in helping individual investors to obtain information and improve returns;on the macro level,the discussion activities(posting,reading,commenting)on platfroms had also improved the the efficiency of market pricing.