The people have spoken! They speak passionately about products they enjoy and adore. We map individual posts into trends, trends into scores, map products to tradeables, and invest into these winners.
Our ApproachNone of this is investment advice. We are not a formal fund open to the outside world. This is a rigorous academic exercise with only our own real money at stake. We operate publicly to ensure self-discipline and garner public feedback on our methods, so we can continue improving. We use real money to ensure there is skin in the game. The approach is as follows:
We sample from TikTok, Reddit, and other social media platforms to get a sense of what products people are talking about, and the momentum of the buzz. Then we scale the buzz into a relative score to understand whether it is rising or falling (vs itsself and vs other products).
Not every product is from a publicly-traded company. Even if the product is from a publicly-traded company, small wins within large conglomerates will not move the stock. We focus on pure-plays or companies with sizeable bets on buzz-garnering products. What are thresholds for "sizeable"?
When is the buzz over? When the buzz tapers, has it affected the stock, or would the gains be lagging, and by how long?
When we find a new company with buzz, how much do we de-allocate from the current index to re-allocate to the new company? All this needs to be quantified into formal rules and thresholds.
Saif has been CTO at sparks & honey (focused on the Q™ cultural intelligence platform) and SVP at parent company, Omnicom. However, Cultural Capital is completely independent from that work. Cultural Capital is in no way affiliated with sparks & honey or Omnicom.
On this personal journey, Cultural Capital, we'll think out loud because there are numerous decisions to be made. Our investment thesis here is novel, so open discussion is valuable. The views expressed here are solely Saif's own and not those of his employers, clients, or partners.
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