Surfacing the Value of Inconspicuous M&A News Sources

Ambiguity Bias – Avoiding the Unknown

We all exhibit biased behavior – even when we think otherwise. Growing up, most of us are conditioned to distrust the unfamiliar. In the finance and capital markets fields, M&A analysts have traditionally relied on vetted sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, to identify potential M&A market chatter. Traditional paradigms, however, have become ineffective in the modern digital age, when unstructured data has grown exponentially.

Today, the number of rumors published by low-popularity M&A news sources, such as Twitter, greatly outnumbers that of high-popularity sources. Therefore, it’s possible that M&A analysts’ ambiguity bias is preventing them from ingesting a majority of the informational alpha in M&A market chatter.

Download the research paper and discover whether there is informational alpha in low popularity M&A sources and why this is important