Quants Scrape Reddit to Help Hedge Funds Dodge More Retail Pain

A list of the hottest stocks on Reddit and Robinhood may seem like a recipe for riches just now, but at Wolfe Research it’s quite the opposite: A list of shares to avoid.

After scraping Reddit boards and Robinhood data, Wolfe’s team of quants is telling institutional clients to avoid fighting this band of newbie day traders altogether. They say the retail army really is emerging as a disruptive show of force that makes both betting on and against their favored stocks a dangerous game for Wall Street players.

By using so-called natural language processing tools, the systematic shop mapped ...