We study the effects of social media on the informativeness of retail trading. Our identification strategy exploits the editorial delay between report submission and publication on Seeking Alpha, a popular crowdsourced investment research platform. We find the ability of retail order imbalances to predict the cross-section of stock returns and cash-flow news increases sharply in the intraday post-publication window relative to the pre-publication window. The findings are robust to controlling for report tone and stronger for reports authored by more capable contributors. The evidence suggests that recent technology-enabled innovations in how individuals share information help retail investors become better informed.

我们研究了社交媒体对零售交易信息量的影响。我们的识别策略利用了在流行的众包投资研究平台 Seeking Alpha 上报告提交和发布之间的编辑延迟。我们发现零售订单不平衡预测股票收益横截面和现金流新闻的能力在发布后的日内窗口相对于发布前的窗口急剧增加。这些发现对于控制报告基调是稳健的，对于更有能力的贡献者撰写的报告来说更强大。证据表明，最近在个人如何共享信息方面的技术创新有助于散户投资者更好地了解情况。