Graduation Year

2023

Date of Submission

12-2022

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Second Department

Computer Science

Reader 1

Professor Mark Huber

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

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2023 Nicholas M Wilson

Abstract

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms there is. With over 436 million monthly active users and over 550 million tweets every day, there are many personal opinions located on one platform. The year 2009, three years after Twitter’s inception, marked the first instance of using this platform for something that was not just to tweet your thoughts, but to use Twitter to improve market performance. StreamBase, a high frequency trading firm, was the first company to implement measures of using Twitter as a form of research for investing. Fast forward to today, we have seen instances where Elon Musk would tweet and then Tesla’s stock price would either skyrocket or tank depending on what he says.

Now that it has been established that commentary on Twitter can greatly impact what occurs in the markets, this thesis looks to focus on the Bitcoin community and determine if their sentiment, or the way they feel about Bitcoin, has any impact on Bitcoin’s price. After narrowing down billions of tweets from 2020, we were left with just under 100,000 tweets that mentioned Bitcoin and were able to be analyzed by our natural language processing package. Our research found that at a large scale, the long term sentiment of the Bitcoin community had a strong correlation with Bitcoin’s long term price. However, our research methods and data were inconclusive in determining if sentiment analysis on a daily scale had any impact on Bitcoin’s daily price action.

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