Searches for “Stockhouse” predict movements in the TSX Comp. With the majority of Stockhouse community focused primarily on TSX listed issuers, I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of google searches for the website and compare it against the TSX Composite Index.
When the Canadian markets are in good spirits and the market is appreciating, I suspected that one would observe an influx of searches to the website as this is one of the foremost forums on TSX/TSXV stocks. In the context of a poster on the bullboards during bullish markets, the odds would be greater that my bullish post for a particular TSX/TSXV issue will turn out to be correct versus making the same post during a bear market.
If we assume that the poster is aware of this, then we should expect to see an increase in google searches for “Stockhouse” and thus website traffic during bullish periods. Alternatively, we would expect to see a drop off in searches for the term during bearish periods.
So I ran a query on “Stockhouse” over the period 2004 – 2015 isolating only Canadian searches and compared this to the daily close price for the TSX Composite index for the same period. It appears that a relationship does exist although there are periods where it breaks down, particularly during March 2009 till July 2010 and then again during March till November 2013.
See chart here: https://trendvesting.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/searches-for-stockhouse-predict-movements-in-the-tsx-composite/