Intro
Greetings you filthy animals! In light of the collapsing market I've been looking for investing strategies that still work (like this). This is another one of them!
The Question
Could a portfolio that invests in stocks when they're mentioned on South Park actually be a viable investment strategy?
The Data
I originally used the South Park Fandom site to brute force scrape every episode script in search of company names listed in the NYSE/NASDAQ database. This picked up a lot of shit and even missed a few obvious ones, like a mention of Campbells Soup in the 2015 episode Red Man's Greed. I needed a different way to get all the data. I hit the jackpot on Wikipedia when I found they have a summary of every episode, complete with a list of references made. I wrote a script to pull the ticker symbols associated with the company names, along with each episode air date. We were in business.
The Strategy
Being mentioned in the episode was our buy signal, so we just needed to test the right time to sell. I played around with a few investment windows – 30 days, 60, 120, 360 – but nothing looked all that impressive. I decided to try a more aggressive approach, completely selling previous holdings as soon as the next company mention occurred. This makes us entirely beholden to South Park as our stock picker, which for some reason is what we want…
The Positions
| 2000-12-13|‘DENN' || 2000-12-13 | ‘DENN' || 2001-11-07 | ‘DIS' || 2003-04-30 | ‘CPB' |
| 2004-11-03 | ‘WMT' || 2006-10-04 | ‘BBY' || 2008-03-19 | ‘CHH' || 2008-04-16 | ‘SBUX' |
| 2008-10-29 | ‘BBY' || 2009-03-11 | ‘DIS' || 2009-03-25 | ‘AXP' || 2009-10-07 | ‘CMG', 'MCD', 'TWTR' |
| 2009-10-21 | ‘WWE' || 2009-11-04 | ‘HOG' || 2010-03-24 | ‘TWTR' || 2010-10-13 | ‘TWTR' |
| 2010-11-03 | ‘NKE' || 2010-11-10 | ‘NKE' || 2010-11-17 | ‘PGR' || 2011-04-27 | ‘AAPL', 'BBY' |
| 2011-05-18 | ‘FDX' || 2011-11-02 | ‘Red Robin' || 2012-10-03 | ‘WMT' || 2012-10-10 | ‘AMZN', 'UPS' |
| 2012-10-31 | ‘NKE' || 2012-11-07 | ‘DIS' || 2013-11-13 | ‘SNE' || 2013-11-20 | ‘MSFT', 'SNE' |
| 2013-12-04 | ‘MSFT', 'Red Robin' || 2014-10-15 | ‘LYFT', 'TSLA', 'UBER' || 2014-11-05 | ‘TWTR' |
| 2014-11-12 | ‘BBY' || 2014-12-03 | ‘TWTR' || 2014-12-10 | ‘TWTR' || 2015-10-14 | ‘YELP' |
| 2016-09-21 | ‘TWTR' || 2016-09-28 | ‘TWTR' || 2017-09-13 | ‘TWTR' || 2017-10-11 | ‘NFLX' |
| 2017-10-25 | ‘ROST' || 2017-11-08 | ‘BYND' || 2017-11-29 | ‘NFLX' || 2018-12-05 | ‘AMZN' |
| 2018-12-12 | ‘AMZN' || 2019-10-02 | ‘AAPL', 'DIS' || 2020-09-30 | ‘Build-A-Bear', 'VIAC' |
The Results
Um….
South Park. Fucking. Destroys. Of course it does because nothing makes sense. Our South Park strategy returned 1100% over the past 7 years, compared to 200% for the S&P 500. This boils down to a 50% CAGR over the past 7 years with a Sharpe ratio of about 1.4. Not too bad. Now, keep in mind that this strategy basically boiled down to “buy Build a Bear and $VIAC during the pandemic.” But gains are gains and this strategy fucking worked. So cheers WSB, you're 2 for 2 on meme strats!
Conclusion
Idk man… I guess just go with what you feel? If this works then who am I or anyone else to tell you a strategy is dumb. If you put a bunch of time in and do your DD you'll probably lose money. If you think your bowl of Cheerios is telling you to buy Realty Income Corp (look it up) then it'll probably be a winner. Up is down, and Cartman should be hosting Mad Money (which I think he did once, right?)
Despite losing my grip on reality a little, this was really fun! Let me know what strategy I should test next!
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