Suppose you had a direct line into the minds of stock-market traders. Would you be able to predict which investment decisions they will take, and thus anticipate the markets?
A team of researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States now suggests that such a crystal ball might exist, in the form of the search terms recorded and made publicly available by Google Trends. Tobias Preis, a computational social scientist at the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues say that their analyses of Google Trends data show “early warning signs” of how the markets will shift — including the financial crash of 2008. Their results appear in Scientific Reports1.
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