UNC finance professor Joey Engelberg has discovered stock ticker symbols that are popularly searched on Google can forecast an upcoming bump in the company’s share price.

Search volume index could be a better predictor for near-term stock performance than traditional measures, which include news headlines and trading volumes.

Current ways of measuring investor interest in a stock assume investors take note of heavily traded or reported on stocks, but that isn’t necessarily true.

In reality, many factors can affect the stock market — and big moves on the part of individual actors can make bumps that few people notice.

But by measuring the search popularity of stock ticker symbols, forecasters look at something investors are directly doing.
Engelberg came up with the concept for his research after the scientific journal Nature published a report connecting Google search trends with flu outbreaks.

This was Engelberg’s first research on the connection between Google search trends and stock performance. He has recently expanded his studies to include product names such as iPads or Xboxes.