Wallstreetbets Contributors and Users Skilled?

Are stock due diligence reports posted on Reddit’s Wallstreetbets (WSB) informative? If so, do users exploit them skillfully? In their March 2021 paper entitled “Place Your Bets? The Market Consequences of Investment Advice on Reddit’s Wallstreetbets”, Daniel Bradley, Jan Hanousek Jr., Russell Jame and Zicheng Xiao examine the value and retail trading impact of single-stock due diligence reports posted on WSB. WSB now has about 9.5 million subscribers and on January 28th, 2021 generated over 271 million pageviews (trailing only Google and YouTube). The authors consider both market-adjusted returns and style-adjusted returns (DGTW-adjusted, compared to stocks matched on size, book-to-market and momentum) of due diligence report stock recommendations. Using 2,340 time-stamped due diligence reports focused on a single common stock (612 distinct stocks) and associated firm accounting data and stock price/trading data during 2018 through 2020, they find that:

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