In response to the financial crisis, consumers continue to visit Stocks and Shares websites in droves.Last week I blogged about brokerage websites hitting their highest volume of US visits in three years on Monday, 15th September but this was just the beginning. US Internet visits to Stocks and Shares websites climbed all week to peak on Friday 19th September at 1.80% of all US Internet visits.
This translates to 1 in every 55 US Internet visits going to a Stocks and Shares website. Compare this volume to the month of August when visits were at 0.97% – an 85% increase.
The chart below shows the weekly share of US Internet visits going to Stocks and Shares websites over the past three years. The next one, below, shows daily visits so far in 2008.


US visits to brokerage websites have slowed slightly but are still well above normal levels. This indicates that consumers remain concerned about the markets but less so than last week.
As my colleague Heather Dougherty pointed out in her post earlier this week, searches for “AIG” and “Lehman” made it into the top 5 fastest moving search terms last week.
Looking at our search data I noticed that search terms on the rise were those that I would associate with news and education. The focus for consumers seemed to be on educating themselves about the crisis and the markets with searches such as “lehman”, “new york stock exchange” and “stock market”. Also, consumers seemed to be seeking out attractive alternatives, with searches for “gold price” soaring.
On a related note, I am keen to try to correlate the price of gold with searches for “gold price”. The following chart shows searches for “gold price” and “stock market”. It would be fascinating to see whether search data could be used as a predictor of market movements. I have found many sources for charts of the price of gold, but need to export the data to excel. Any suggestions?