The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) is launching a new index series that will track stocks receiving attention on social media.

The new CBOE-SMA large-cap index (SMLC index) is to be the first in a series of sentiment-based strategy benchmarks that measure short-term market momentum based on social media metrics, such as Twitter mentions.

The SMLC index is “designed to track the performance of a hypothetical strategy that on a daily basis buys an equally weighted portfolio of 25 stocks with high [social media] scores.”

The new indices are being created under a licensing agreement between the CBOE and Chicago-based Social Market Analytics (SMA), which aims to cull actionable intelligence from social media sources.

The social media scores, which are based on Twitter traffic by SMA algorithms, aim to “reflect investors’ sentiment about stocks and are believed to be predictive market signals,” the firm says in a release.

Each index in the planned suite of indices will track the performance of a portfolio of stocks or options referenced to a defined universe of stocks. The portfolio of the initial SMLC Index will be constituted daily at 8:30 a.m. central time (CT) from the CBOE’s large-cap universe, based on SMA’s social media scores as of 8:10 a.m. CT.