Sentiment Analysis on Financial Articles

Understanding Interest Volatility from FOMC Meeting Proceedings


 

This study measures the effects of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) communications on interest rates. We find that, in recent years, the typical FOMC statement moved mid-term interest rates by 1.1 to 2.8 basis points (bps) up or down. If a press conference is held the day of the meeting, this movement is 0.9 bps greater. Releasing meeting minutes three weeks later only moves interest rates if the FOMC meeting was not followed by a press conference, indicating that the press conference and meeting minutes contain duplicate information. We propose this measure of the volatility effect of the communication itself as a check on the accuracy of text-mining methods that measure the market effects of specific words or sentiments. Next, we identify keywords describing sentiments conveyed and topics discussed in FOMC meetings. Frequencies of these words appear to predict interest rate movements in a regression context. However, two pieces of evidence suggest that these regressions overfit the interest rate data. First, the regression-predicted interest rate movements far exceed the average market effects of an entire statement or press conference. Second, if the frequencies of our keywords summarize the market-moving content in the data— as the regression results suggest—and if the press conferences and minutes contain duplicate information—as our first results indicate—then we would expect the keyword frequencies to be correlated between the press conferences and minutes.

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Sunandan Chakraborty
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Christopher Rohlfs
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Morgan Stanley

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Center for Technology and Economic Development, NYUAD