Many of the trading decisions that have led to financial crises are captured by vast, detailed stock market datasets. Here, we summarize two of our recent studies which investigate whether Internet usage data contain traces of attempts to gather information before such trading decisions were taken. By analyzing changes in how often Internet users searched for financially related information on Google (Preis et al., Sci Rep 3∶1684, 2013) and Wikipedia (Moat et al., Sci Rep 3∶1801, 2013), patterns are found that may be interpreted as "early warning signs" of stock market moves. Our results suggest that online data may allow us to gain new insight into early information gathering stages of economic decision making.
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