There are plenty of examples of websites and platforms that attempt to scan r/wallstreetbets to create alert systems. A page on Medium.com -- an online publishing platform -- is dedicated to “Momentum Trading off Sentiment from r/wallstreetbets.” A blog post on a website called algotrading101.com reads “Web Scraping Tutorial – Reddit Data for Finance.”
“We have plenty of people that have tried to leverage Wall Street Bets in some form or another for opportunity, for profit,” said Jaime Rogozinski, the thread’s founder. “Some shady, some legal, some blatantly illegal.”
As an institutional sales trader, Susquehanna’s Murphy tracks retail trends in options and supplies it to clients, alongside other research. He tends toward classic market data, and based on trading volume and size, he’s able to tell if retail flow is flooding in. In the past, before website Robintrack.net -- which provided hourly updates on retail stock demand -- was forced to shut when the Robinhood investing app curtailed access to data, he’d sometimes use the site to confirm his suspicions.
“You can’t look at Robintrack anymore, but usually I would be more likely to reverse engineer it. I pull up Robintrack just to confirm, ‘Ah, yeah, it’s number five, or it’s moving up,’” Murphy said. “You could try to go the other way, but not having Robintrack now makes it a little bit more difficult.”
When it was live, Robintrack attracted hedge funds and other large financial firms that were interested in aggregating the site’s data. The website, built in three months as a college side project, may no longer exist in an up-to-date form, but that hasn’t deterred large professional players from tracking retail investment decisions. Rather, they’re getting more creative.
--With assistance from Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal and Claire Ballentine.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.