The United States’ position on trade and the Federal Open Market Committee’s outlook both govern the pricing of equities, debt, and other derivatives domestically and internationally. Unprecedented executive influence on trade and the Fed, coupled with a president’s unpredictable and instantaneous communication on Twitter, inspired banks and trading firms to create indexes, bots, and derivatives to account for this phenomenon. This thesis asks the question: how do President Donald Trump’s tweets affect the broader stock market in terms of pricing and volatility? I use intra-day event study analysis on a sample of 2148 President Donald Trump tweets to evaluate the market impact of general tweets. I segmented the tweets into Fed-related tweets, Trade-related tweets, and other tweets before evaluating the pricing and volatility impacts using the SPX index and VIX index respectively. I found significant differences between the market reaction to trade-related tweets and Fed-related tweets and other tweets.
Author: Ian M. Kenny, Class of 2020
Advisor: Greg Brown, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School