Using Google Trends to gauge Company Interest Over Time for Free (Python Tutorial)

The level of public interest in a company may be significant for algorithmic trading for a number of reasons:

• A high level of interest may indicate that people want to learn about the company’s products and services, which may increase sales revenue and eventually the stock price.
• A high level of interest may also indicate that people are interested in news related to the company — good or bad — and that this may translate into stock purchases or sales and affect the volatility of an asset.
• A comparison between two companies, one with a high level of interest and one with a lower level may indicate that the former is more risky to invest in due to a higher level of price volatility.

All these assumptions are somewhat logical but require further study — which I am planning to provide in a future post.

In this post I would like to take the first step which is comparing the public interest between different companies. One way to gauge public interest is to analyze search volume for the company name using Google Trends.

If you’re on the edge of your seat and would like to learn how to perform this analysis in Python, read on.

This story is solely for general…