Business newspaper stock recommendations for intraday trading: empirical analysis from India

With the introduction of easy computerised trading platforms and online trading, intraday trading has been widely used by novices as well as individual investors, in addition to professional traders and investors. People are lured to intraday trading, due to quick gains (results) from it. Today, information about stock recommendations is available from various sources like newspapers, websites, search engines, social media, brokers, etc. Despite the rise in the extensive use of the internet, there is an increase in the readership of newspapers in India. The objective of the paper was to study and critically evaluate the intraday trading stock recommendations provided by the Economics Times newspaper in India for intraday trading. The paper investigates the efficacy of possible returns from this recommendation for day traders. The methodology used was evaluating the recommendations up to a fixed return of 1% for both the buy and sell side in intraday trading. The results show that buy recommendations provide negative returns, but sell recommendations provide positive returns. But overall, it is found that trades done based on these recommendations earn no significant returns for the traders. Also, brokers recommendations provided in the newspaper show no significant returns for the traders.