We present a simple economic asset pricing model to uncover mechanisms that explain mispricing due to heterogeneous beliefs and short interest. We then use data from Reddit and S&P500 test assets to test hypothesis about the mechanisms proposed, in particular social media, short interest and firm value correlations, social media and short interest as risk factors on expected returns and portfolio sorts on social media and short interest to examine potential abnormal returns. We find that a metric of the difference in the number or optimists minus pessimists is promising to understand the role of social media in financial markets and short interest.

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