August | 2018 | iMarketSignals

Past research suggests that the relative change in the volume of Google searches for financial terms such as “debt” or “stocks” can be used to anticipate stock market trends.
In this analysis the search term “debt” was used to obtain monthly search volume data from Google Trends.
The analysis shows, that a decrease in search volume typically preceded price increases of the S&P 500 index, and vice versa.
Switching between ETF (SPY) and ETF (IEF) based on monthly search volume data from 2005 to 2018, would have made a profit of 634% versus 220% for buy-and-hold SPY.