We analyze over 27,000 social media livestreams by Chinese mutual funds to investigate whether they achieve regulators’ goal of improving retail investment decisions. Our findings indicate that livestreams generate significant inflows, often within minutes of their start times. Yet rather than educating investors, livestreams amplify return-chasing behavior and predict sharp declines in fund performance. Investors who buy in response to livestreams would earn higher returns by holding index funds or even cash. Further analyses using deep learning algorithms reveal that livestreams are more persuasive when speakers are more physically attractive, use more positive language, and sound more excited. We conclude that livestreams primarily function as persuasive advertising and that regulators should be wary of educational efforts led by sellers of consumer financial products. We also conclude that prior evidence on the benefits of firms’ social media use in equity markets does not extend to financial product markets in this setting.

We identify a specific organizational resource in brokerage houses—information sharing among analyst colleagues who cover economically related industries along a supply chain. After controlling for brokerage selection effects, we show evidence consistent with the benefit of this resource to analyst research performance. Specifically, we find that analysts whose colleagues cover more economically connected industries have better research performance, especially when their colleagues produce higher-quality research. We further show that colleagues' coverage of downstream (upstream) industries is positively related to the accuracy of only analysts’ revenue (expense) forecasts and that analysts and their highly connected colleagues tend to issue earnings forecast revisions contemporaneously. Last, we find that analysts with economically connected colleagues tend to have a higher level of industry specialization. Overall, our findings suggest that analysts rely on organizational resources to produce high-quality research. Hence, a portion of their performance and reputation is not transferable across employers.