But does it actually work? Let’s look at the numbers.

Check out the benchmark report. It’s essentially a test run that shows you how the algorithm performs on past tweets and market data. You’ll see that it sometimes misses a company or gets a sentiment wrong, but it also gets it right a lot. The trading strategy sometimes leaves you up and sometimes down.

Overall, the algorithm seems to succeed more often than not: The simulated fund has an annualized return of about 59% since inception. There are limits to the simulation and the underlying data, so take it all with a grain of salt.

The results of running a simulated fund with a $100,000 initial investment

Think you can make it perform better? Fork the code on GitHub! There are a bunch of obvious things to improve and there’s a lot of room for creative ideas. I started collecting a list of them here.