EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. It is evident that a higher positive sentiment rate will tend to be associated with a lower Nasdaq Close Price.


2. COVID and Racial Equality related posts tend to have a larger proportion of negative sentiment, while Economics and Gender Equality related posts are likely to be more positive.

Data Analysis

Mainly Short Posts

After processing and splitting the text, the length of each post can be obtained. Since the subject of the subreddit is #PoliticalCompassMemes, which is about memes and pictures, so most of the posts (over 60%) are really short, with less than 20 words.

People, Government, State, and Country

Before using CountVectorizer and TF-IDF, data cleaning procedures including tokenizing, removing stop words and lemmatizing were applied onto the text. And in agreement with the results, People, Government, State, and Country are the most important words in the posts.

Higher Positive Sentiment Rate, Lower Nasdaq Close Price

To find the relationship between the daily sentiment of the reddit posts and Nasdaq close price, a contour plot was made here. And according to the plot, it can be recognized that there is an evidently negative relationship between the positive sentiment rate and Nasdaq close price.

Centrist Posts Tend to be More Positive

For most of the author flair type, the positive sentiment rates are around 0.575, while the centrists' posts tend to have higher positive sentiment rates, which are around 0.625-0.65.

Positive Posts Usually Gain a Higher Score

In accordance with the boxenplot, a positive post is more likely to obtain a higher post score, compared with a nagetive or neutral post.

COVID Made a More Negative Atmosphere

After the outbreak of the COVID, the monthly negative posts proportion tends to increase from 0.32 to 0.37, elucidating that the pandemic seems to make the subreddit posts more negative.

Different Topics, Different Sentiments

COVID and Racial Equality related posts tend to have a larger proportion of negative sentiment, while Economics and Gender Equality related posts are likely to be more positive.

Summary

1. Most of the posts (over 60%) are less than 20 words.
2. People, Government, State, and Country are the most important words in the posts.
3. There is an evidently negative relationship between the positive sentiment rate and Nasdaq close price.
4. The centrists' posts tend to have higher positive sentiment rates.
5. Positive Posts Usually Gain a Higher Score.
6. The pandemic seems to make the subreddit posts more negative.
7. COVID and Racial Equality related posts tend to have a larger proportion of negative sentiment, while Economics and Gender Equality related posts are likely to be more positive.

Resources