Here's What Twitter Is Watching: Oil, The ECB & Volatility

Market Prophit collects and studies how social media commentary relates to –- and impacts -- the stock market.

On Monday, Benzinga spoke with CEO Igor Gonta, who provided some insight on a few trending topics in the social media space.

Oil

The United States Oil Fund ETF USO continues to be one of the main themes in the markets. This fund seeks to reflect the performance of the spot price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) light, sweet crude oil.

As volatility lingers and WTI prices continue to fall -- now below $50 a barrel for the first time in more than five years -- Market Prophit experts remain bearish. According to Gonta, they started diverging from the Crowd around mid-November. The average social media user remains bullish.

Euro-US Dollar

“With markets focused on The European Central Bank’s Quantitative Easing Program potentially coming, the Euro is continuing to take a pounding,” Gonta explained.

Once again, the Crowd has recently been bullish on EUR/USD, while the Market Prophits are bearish. In this case, the latter started to diverge from the former in the middle of December.

Volatility

According to Market Prophit’s analysis of social sentiment, there has been a lot of talk about 2015 being more volatile than 2014.  

iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN VXX is a Barclays fund designed to provide investors with exposure to the S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Index Total Return, which is, in turn, designed to provide access to equity market volatility through CBOE Volatility Index futures.

Understandably, as talk about volatility multiplies, the VXX ETF is quite popular.

According to Gonta, both the Crowd and experts are bullish, which signals "potentially more volatile times ahead."