Can We Believe the Fund Reviews in Internet Forums?

Whether the reviews in Internet can be trusted or not is an important issue to all individuals in making their investment decision. By using natural language techniques, this paper extracts the sentiment of fund reviews and compares it with the professional fund rating results provided by the authorized investment research institute in China. The experiments show that the sentiment of reviews and the professional fund rating have a significantly correlation and the index constructed by sentiment analysis can effectively reflect the specialists´ opinions. It implies that although there is so much noise in Internet forums, the total sentiment orientation is valuable and can be trusted to support funds investment decision making.