[kristopolous]

The investment fidelity of this information is likely pretty high - not necessarily with this analysis ... but investment picks from topics popular on hn (ex: tesla, bitcoin, apple, amazon[ec2]) were ahead of the market.

Products, services, or companies repeatedly lauded in the comment section, in my experience, are remarkably indicative of future broader trends.

For instance, this user, in 2010, lamented about the rampant bitcoin discussions as excessively overflowing on hn like some irritating internet meme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998630 ... at the time of posting, bitcoins were selling for $0.06 each. Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.

I can imagine an arb-style subscription to the right sql queries could be packaged and resold for extremely good profit to the right people.

[patio11]

Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.

The same signal would have also fired, much more strongly, from August 2013 through December 2013. The LPs of the VC firms who share your view of its predictive power are presently not very happy.

[dd367]

That's a super interesting thought. You should consider that the sum total of popularity of topics on HN up till today can't be used in hindsight as a predictor. It would be interesting to see if we merely looked for past spikes in keywords and used that to govern investment decisions. Even then, I fear that for every "bitcoin" and "apple", there may be other technologies and companies (especially smaller startups) that didn't work out so well, although I hypothesize a net positive.

Despite it being public data, because the information circulated on HN is at the core of technology, it could prove valuable to investors with limited knowledge of it (and might well be worth packaging and selling, haha).

[kristopolous]

I'd like to postulate that the average disposable income of an active hn user is probably, with respect to forums of the same class as hn (metafilter, reddit, digg, etc) one of the highest. (There's been historical self-reported polls eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725 - 44% of respondents are in the top 10% income, ~25% are in the top 5% and ~4% are in the top 1%)

I'd also like to postulate that if you were to segment the market into "early adopters", hn would have a larger share of this segment then other forums in the same class, of an equivalent or greater volume of traffic.

If this postulation is correct, then effectively hn is "trendsetters with money" ... a good group to listen to.

I don't have data to back these claims up, but intuitively I feel they are pretty safe.

This of course doesn't give any indication of market velocity. I've done a number of investments based on HN at the wrong velocity - I presumed the stock had been undervalued because of hn content, when in fact, the market had YET to undervalue it. I forecasted a distant chance of success given an undervalued stock (in this case blackberry) - knowing that they were going to do an android with a physical keyboard <eventually>, and I invested upon this speculation --- well before the market doubted the future of the company.

As a result, I bought it way early and it fell precipitously and is only rebounding slightly now. So no, this isn't a magic sauce to time the events or how they will affect the market price, just perhaps one to forecast their eventuality.