Media and Investors’ Attention. Estimating analysts’ ratings and sentiment of a financial column to predict abnormal returns

In line with the attention grabbing theory, the publication of articles dealing with the profile of single listed companies along with financial analysts' recommendations is followed by significant increases when the recommendation is positive. In this paper, we tried to understand what happens when analysts' recommendations are missing. We estimated analysts’ recommendations with a classification based on the terms in the articles and through a sentiment analysis of the same texts. Results showed that investors transform the articles’ content into implicit recommendations that guide their buying decisions when the sentiment is highly positive.