Investors and traders have been trying to predict the performance on the stock market for years. And while everybody claims to have a system, there is still no definitive solution to peeking into the future of Wall Street. As it turns out, the answer may lie in Twitter yeah, that Twitter.

Going back to 2011, there have been reports of tech savvy stock watchers leveraging the popular social network to predict market performance. The latest comes from the findings of a study conducted by the University of California Riverside. Professor Vagelis Hristidis led a group of engineers and scientists as they attempted to figure out if the buzz surrounding the most heavily hyped companies on Twitter translated to their performance on the market. The group found that correlation did indeed exist.

According to the findings, companies being frequently talked about on Twitter faired better on the stock market than those that generated less hype. For more specific results, the group conducted a four-month trial period where it was determined that the stocks predicted as prime performers on Twitter dropped just 2.2%, in comparison to the 4.2% loss the Dow Jones industrial average suffered. Even Hristidis was baffled at the correlation and why the research produced the results it did.

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Fields Primed for Twitter Predictions

The talk of Twitter trends being used to help predict the performance of companies on the stock market got us thinking about what other areas it might be able to lend predictive insights to. Here are a few we found.

Movies In “Predicting the Future With Social Media”, an essay written by Sitarum Asur and Bernardo Huberman, the pair of researchers measured the impact the social media frenzy had on top-budget Hollywood films and their box office performance. What they determined was that they could more or less predict the success of certain movies based on the hype they generated through Twitter prior to premiering.

Investing If Twitter can be helpful for stock market investors, it can no doubt prove useful for venture capitalists looking to invest in promising startups. U.K. firm Derwent Capital Markets is one company that said it plans to use the microblogging site to help decide which startups they should invest in, and which should be avoided.

Your Niche Monitoring Twitter trends can provide insight into the future of any market even the one your company specializes in. With the right tools at your disposal, you will be one step closer to learning who is a good fit for your network, what your audience is most likely to respond to, and much more.

Before we close, we must stress that Twitter is by no means the Holy grail for predicting the future of anything. Without that magical and elusive crystal ball, any prediction can turn out to be a flop. However, the results it has produced have been nothing short of impressive, and in the future, the intelligence it delivers could get even better.