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Main Authors: Halousková, Martina, Lyócsa, Štefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19767
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author Halousková, Martina
Lyócsa, Štefan
author_facet Halousková, Martina
Lyócsa, Štefan
contents Macroeconomic variables are known to significantly impact equity markets, but their predictive power for price fluctuations has been underexplored due to challenges such as infrequency and variability in timing of announcements, changing market expectations, and the gradual pricing in of news. To address these concerns, we estimate the public's attention and sentiment towards ten scheduled macroeconomic variables using social media, news articles, information consumption data, and a search engine. We use standard and machine-learning methods and show that we are able to improve volatility forecasts for almost all 404 major U.S. stocks in our sample. Models that use sentiment to macroeconomic announcements consistently improve volatility forecasts across all economic sectors, with the greatest improvement of 14.99% on average against the benchmark method - on days of extreme price variation. The magnitude of improvements varies with the data source used to estimate attention and sentiment, and is found within machine-learning models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Forecasting U.S. equity market volatility with attention and sentiment to the economy
Halousková, Martina
Lyócsa, Štefan
General Finance
Macroeconomic variables are known to significantly impact equity markets, but their predictive power for price fluctuations has been underexplored due to challenges such as infrequency and variability in timing of announcements, changing market expectations, and the gradual pricing in of news. To address these concerns, we estimate the public's attention and sentiment towards ten scheduled macroeconomic variables using social media, news articles, information consumption data, and a search engine. We use standard and machine-learning methods and show that we are able to improve volatility forecasts for almost all 404 major U.S. stocks in our sample. Models that use sentiment to macroeconomic announcements consistently improve volatility forecasts across all economic sectors, with the greatest improvement of 14.99% on average against the benchmark method - on days of extreme price variation. The magnitude of improvements varies with the data source used to estimate attention and sentiment, and is found within machine-learning models.
title Forecasting U.S. equity market volatility with attention and sentiment to the economy
topic General Finance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19767