David Portnoy Versus Everyone: An investing study of the fintwit celebrity

From 2021

At Unusual Whales, there’s a feature that tracks Furus and the stocks they mention. In this report, we’ll take a deeper dive into the self-proclaimed Furu: Dave Portnoy aka @stoolpresidente aka the founder of Barstool Sports.Fresh off the heels of Penn National Gaming buying a 36% stake in Barstool and the pandemic beating down the stock market (PENN included), Portnoy jumped into day trading in March 2020. With his celebrity status, large social media following and sharing market hot takes via “Davey Day Trading Global” (#DDTG), he was quickly deemed a leader for “an army of day traders” by Bloomberg in July 2020.In this report, we’ll cover:

• When and what Portnoy has tweeted about
• What’s usually happening with the asset when Portnoy tweets
• Hypothetical returns if we followed Portnoy’s tweets

The analysis includes tweets from @stoolepresidente from January 4 to August 16, 2021. Stock tweets were considered to be any tweets containing “$” followed by 3-4 letters. Crypto tweets were considered to be any that included the words: “bitcoin”, “safemoon” or “dogecoin/doge”.

Dave Portnoy never tweets in the AM

When we look at when Portnoy tweets during the week and about what here’s what we find:

• He starts tweeting around noon and rarely before
• He tweets the most about stocks on Thursday and Friday afternoons
• He tweets the most about cryptocurrencies in the evenings
• If he’s tweeting past midnight, it’s about stocks or crypto

Portnoy loves $PENN

When we break down Portnoy’s 2021 tweets by the stocks mentioned, we see that he has consistently tweeted about $PENN, followed by $GME, $AMC and $BUZZ.In the chart below, you can hover over each data point to see what he tweeted, when it was tweeted, its retweet count and favorite count. You can drag and zoom in. Double click to reset.

As for crypto, Portnoy’s longest obsession this year has been with bitcoin. In the spring, he dabbled in dogecoin, but publicly divested by late April calling it a “ponzi scheme”. He continued to tweet about doge throughout May, but it was mostly Elon commentary. Shortly afterwards Portnoy then focused his attention on SafeMoon in late May and mid-June. He has tweeted about HODLing his SafeMoon.

Market movement when Portnoy decides to tweet

Let’s add in stock market data to visualize how the stock is changing when Portnoy decides to tweet about it. The interactive price charts below show Portnoy’s tweets and roughly classify them, by comparing the prices a day before and a day after, into the following: tweets that were on the way up, down, at the local top or local bottom. Tweets from the first day a ticker was listed or on IPO day were noted as such (ex. $BUZZ‘s first day).You can select the ticker of interest to see all related tweets in 2021. Each dot is a tweet. If there was more than one on a day, they are shifted vertically to prevent overlapping. Hover over a dot to see the text, retweet count and favorite count. Zoom in by dragging a box around the area of interest. Double click to reset the chart.

By counting the tweets and categories, we can create the following summary table:

Here are some observations on Portnoy’s stock tweets:

• $AMC tweets came when the stock was already at the top or already at the bottom
• Most $BUZZ tweets came on the first day the ETF was listed
• $CCIV, $PENN, $RKT and $SHOP tweets were usually at the top
• But 44% of those $PENN tweets were on the way down or at the bottom
• $GME tweets were on the way up or already at the peak
• $SCR tweets came usually when it was on the rise

Let’s take a look at Portnoy’s crypto tweets:

Summarizing his tweets, we observe the following:

• Portnoy tweeted about bitcoin the most when it was on the rise or already at a peak
• His SafeMoon tweets were usually when the price was dropping or at the bottom

Portnoy tweets and longer term changes in stock price

Let’s zoom out from a 3-day period to a 10-day period. What happening with a stock over a week when Portnoy tweets about it? Note that we can’t say that Portnoy tweeted and caused a stock to go up or down. However, we can say that the stock was already headed up or down and Portnoy decided to tweet about it during that time.In the charts below, the dotted blue line indicates the day Portnoy tweeted about it (Day 0). Each grey line tracks the percent changes in stock price from 3-days before to 1-week after compared to the price on Day 0. In this way we can see how the stock was trending relative to the day he tweeted.Both stock price and volume charts can be found below. You can select a ticker of interest from the dropdown menu. You can hover over each line to see the tweet(s). The red line is the average change. You can zoom in and you can reset by double clicking.

Here are some observations based off of the above charts:

• On average, Portnoy tweeted at the height of daily stock activity with volume dropping in the days following his tweet.
• Stock prices, on average, continued their trend upward following tweets for $GME, $BUZZ (following listing day), $HOOD (following IPO day), $LITE, $PYPL and $SWBI.
• Stock prices, on average, continued their downward trend following tweets for $AMC, $NOK, $CCIV, $SHOP, $RKT and $SNDL.
• Stock prices, on average, did not change much following Portnoy’s tweets for $PENN and $SCR.

Doing the same longer term analysis on his crypto tweets, we see that:

• On average, bitcoin price and volume remain steady in the days following his past tweets
• The price and volume of dogecoin and safemoon trend downward following his past tweets

Returns

Let’s say, we were tech savvy fanboys of Portnoy. We decided to create a bot to invest in the stocks and cryptocurrencies he tweeted about on those days. How would this hypothetical portfolio perform in 2021? The following tables show the estimated returns on our little thought experiment.Hypothetical stock returns if bot invested in every ticker Portnoy mentioned

Hypothetical crypto returns if bot invested in every crypto Portnoy mentioned

Obvious limitations to this thought experiment include no sentiment analysis done on the substance of his tweets. However, a cursory glance through his tweets/vids show that most of them are usually bullish on the asset he’s mentioning.As of mid-August, our hypothetical Portnoy portfolio is not doing well. In the stock market, we’d be down -17%, while our crypto wallet would be down -21%.Here’s one last thought experiment… What if every time Portnoy had tweeted about a stock, we had bought $SPY instead? Well, we’d be up +20% right now.

Limitations of the analysis

• Did not apply sentiment analysis to determine positive or negative sentiment towards stock
• Did not separate trading hours vs. after hours tweets
• Did not separate views expressed purely in DDTG videos