Sentiment and hype of business media topics and stock market returns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We examine COVID-19 related topics discussed in the printed edition of the Wall Street Journal. Using text analytics and topic modeling algorithms, we discover 15 distinct topics and present differences in their sentiment (polarity) and hype (intensity of coverage) trends throughout 2020. Importantly, the hype of the topic, not the sentiment, relates to stock market returns. In particular, the hype scores for Debt market and Financial markets have the strongest positive relation to the stock market performance.