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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Finfluencers and the retail trade

Retail investors are a large topic in the finance journals, but only 8 of 139 recent papers on them carry a social-media keyword, and "finfluencers" appears on just 2. Do the trades that follow a finance influencer's post earn anything, and who profits from the audience?

financemarket microstructuremedia

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 139 papers carry a retail- or individual-investor keyword (109 in finance journals, 13 in accounting). Only 8 of them also carry a social-media, influencer, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube or TikTok keyword, and "finfluencers" appears on 2 papers. "Social media" itself appears on 115 papers, most of them in AI and management journals, where it is studied as text rather than as a source of trades.

Questions#

  • After a popular finance influencer recommends a stock, how much retail order flow follows, and do the followers earn or lose money over the next weeks?
  • Do influencers who are paid by brokers or issuers recommend worse stocks than those who are not?
  • Did disclosure rules for paid promotion, now in force in several countries, change what influencers post and how markets react?

Data that could help#

Timestamped posts from TikTok, YouTube and X with view counts, retail order flow proxies such as off-exchange trades, and stock returns.

Next step#

Collect the posts of 50 finance influencers for one year, match the stocks they mention to retail trading volume and returns, and compare paid and unpaid posts.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
retail investor attention0–20
finfluencers0–4
social media7#242415

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/finfluencers-and-retail-trading.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Finfluencers and the retail trade. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/finfluencers-and-retail-trading

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-finfluencers-and-retail-trading,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Finfluencers and the retail trade},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/finfluencers-and-retail-trading}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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