Portfolio value on a $100 investment: The Inverse YouTuber strategy outperforms QQQ and S&P 500, while all other strategies underperform.

Data Source: Hundreds of recommendation videos by YouTube financial influencers (2018–2024).
Tools Used: Matplotlib, manual annotation, backtesting scripts.
Original Source Article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5315526

Posted by mgalarny

8 comments

  2. Like when YouTubers say buy you don’t buy and when they say don’t buy you buy?

  3. So the port does well in a bear market. Not so well otherwise.

  4. From the abstract:

    > While high-conviction recommendations perform better than low-conviction ones, they still underperform the popular S&P 500 index fund. An inverse strategy-betting against finfluencer recommendations-outperforms the S&P 500 by 6.8% in annual returns but carries greater risk (Sharpe ratio of 0.41 vs. 0.65).

  5. How do you go from $100 to -$120 back to positive cash with normal investments??

    [edit] Everyone is completely missing the point. Every other line here represents a “normal” investment strategy where you max losses are $100. OP just casually mixed in a much riskier strategy. The comparison is nonsense.

  8. For selling, are you accounting for borrowing costs to short the stock? I skimmed the paper but didn’t see mention of it. 

    What was the ratio of buy to sell recommendations? Am I correct to assume that there are way more buy recommendations than sell? 

    I know this paper is mostly about your VideoConviction model, but to nitpick: The Inverse YouTuber strategy would need to pay a lot of borrowing fees, right? Is this accounted for?

Comments are closed.