Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Scrolling social media for investing help? You might want to think twice about who to follow.
A financial paper published last year by the Swiss Finance Institute showed that advice from 28% of "influencers" indeed led to positive returns. However, 56% gave money-losing recommendations, and 16% provided no value at all.
Yet, "antiskilled" financial influencers — those that give money-losing advice to their audience — have more followers even though they generate a negative 2.3% monthly return, the study found.
The authors, who focused on tweet-level data from 29,000 accounts, said there are a few reasons for this.
First, these finfluencers have no actual duty to dispense sound advice, and it's not necessary for finfluencers to be right to retain followers.
Second, retail investors seek out social media influencers who share the same behavioral traits. What's more, the message is more important than the messenger, the study said, and investors will often be drawn to the positive outlooks that antiskilled finfluencers preach.
"Following the advice by antiskilled finfluencers creates overly optimistic beliefs most of the time since their tweets tend to be bullish about most stocks, and overly pessimistic beliefs some of the time when their tweets tend to be more pessimistic than the skilled influencers' tweets," the paper wrote.
They added: "Furthermore, the social media sentiment by antiskilled finfluencers is highly persistent and induces long swings in the magnitude of their followers' belief bias."
The authors found that despite their popularity, anti-skilled investment advice is so persistent that those who bet against it could earn a 1.2% monthly return.
In that case, how should investors determine which finfluencers are worth following? Tweet frequency, tone, and follower count are telling signs.
"One may think that users who tweet more often are more likely to be experts and have more valuable information. On the other hand, users who tweet more often are also more likely to be overconfident or charlatans who believe that a large tweeting volume proxies for skill," the study said.
Therefore, fewer followers and posts are typically signs of a skilled account.
Given that antiskilled finfluencers tend to ride investing sentiment, their tone will follow the broader market attitude. That means that they'll tweet positively after a return, and negatively after a loss, while skilled accounts do the opposite.
Investors will also want to avoid the 16% of finfluencers that are unskilled, or offer no returns. To find these, looks for signs including active accounts with few likes, finfluencers promoting more ideas, or accounts that tout news-featured "hot" stocks.
