Google’s search engine has replaced the encyclopedias that I grew up with in the 1970’s. Nowadays, one goes straight to Google for answers on just about anything, including of course news about stock market and what other investors are thinking about the stock market.  You can probably see where I’m heading – Google search is literally ‘big data’ at your finger-tips, perhaps the ultimate place to become insanely rich by finding exploitable connections between financial variables. So, how good is Goggle as a source of information for predicting stock prices?  This is what I want to talk about today.  I happened to have done some serious research on this topic which I will share with you in a moment. Let let me first say a few words about data mining to set the stage.

A couple of years ago, two researchers at the University of Bristol combed a database containing 133