The Volfefe Index was a stock market index of volatility in market sentiment for US Treasury bonds caused by tweets by former President Donald Trump. [1] [2] [3]
Bloomberg News observed Volfefe was created due to the statistical significance of Trump tweets on bond prices. [1] ABC News Online posited Volfefe could help analyze interest rate risk in the face of "unpredictable" activity on social media by Trump. [2]
The name "Volfefe" is a portmanteau of the words volatility and covfefe , the latter being a word (widely presumed to be a typographical error) posted in a 2017 tweet by Trump. [3] [4] [5]
Volfefe was launched by JPMorgan Chase on September 9, 2019. [1] [3] [4]
In forming the basis of the methodology behind Volfefe, JPMorgan Chase used software to analyse the corpus of Trump's tweets. [6] [7] [8] 14,000 tweets were used in the analysis to form the initial projections for their software. [6] Their analysts determined that there were direct correlations between tweets and subsequent market movements. [5] [7] [8] These market movements were most notably evidenced when the tweet specifically references financial matters including the US Federal Reserve. [2] [9] The tweets issued during the working day of the New York Stock Exchange were more likely to cause a change in market sentiment; however, it was noted that the tweets can come at any time of day and thus have an effect on markets around the world. [2] [9] Key words in tweets often include "China", "billion", "products", "Democrats", "great", "dollars", "tariffs" and "trade". [2] [9]
Bloomberg News noted, "JPMorgan’s 'Volfefe Index,' named after Trump’s mysterious covfefe tweet from May 2017, suggests that the president’s electronic musings are having a statistically significant impact on Treasury yields." [1]
ABC News Online commented JP Morgan created Volfefe, "to measure how much impact Mr Trump's unpredictable tweets have on US interest rates". [2]
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational finance company headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. It is the largest bank in the United States and the world's largest bank by market capitalization as of 2023. As the largest of Big Four banks, the firm is considered systemically important by the Financial Stability Board. Its size and scale have often led to enhanced regulatory oversight as well as the maintenance of an internal "Fortress Balance Sheet". The firm is headquartered at 383 Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and is set to move into the under-construction JPMorgan Chase Building at 270 Park Avenue in 2025.
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Covfefe is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet when he was President of the United States. It instantly became an Internet meme.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump has stated he will not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account has since remained inactive.
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In January 2021, a short squeeze of the stock of the American video game retailer GameStop and other securities took place, causing major financial consequences for certain hedge funds and large losses for short sellers. Approximately 140 percent of GameStop's public float had been sold short, and the rush to buy shares to cover those positions as the price rose caused it to rise even further. The short squeeze was initially and primarily triggered by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, an Internet forum on the social news website Reddit, although a number of hedge funds also participated. At its height, on January 28, the short squeeze caused the retailer's stock price to reach a pre-market value of over US$500 per share, nearly 30 times the $17.25 valuation at the beginning of the month. The price of many other heavily shorted securities and cryptocurrencies also increased.
