[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.