Stock Price Jumps and News Sentiment: A Case of Investor Overreaction

Abstract

The research paper develops an understanding on how news based sentiment capture investor behaviour reflected in price jumps in stock markets. It compares the impact on two models of stock price jumps; the non-parametric model proposed by BNS and the wavelet based method. The study is also a perspective on the semi strong form of market efficiencyUsing the high frequency data from the stock and options market along with the actual high frequency news data from Bloomberg, the two alternative methodologies of jumps have been tested. In addition, options trades have been simulated to see whether profits can be earned from the news sentiment captured by jumps.Methodologically, jumps based on wavelets were found to be better related  with the news sentiment compared to the BNS method. Also,   the news sentiment based jumps were found to present opportunities in the simulated trades that could be exploited for earning profits suggesting that investors overreact.The paper uses an innovative method for computation of the news based sentiment. To the best of our knowledge, the paper is the first to evaluate jumps and news sentiment using the actual news data. A perspective on the semi strong form of market efficiency is presented, that too by departing from the event study based models.