Electronic data analytics firm Dataminr announced on Monday a system to create actionable signals for investors based on public Twitter posts.
The New York City-based firm is dubbing the feed an early warning system for breaking news and emerging events. It allows stock traders to receive signals of news that could affect the market, and it does that in real-time, often in advance of mainstream news.
Ted Bailey, founder and chief executive officer of Dataminr, said Twitter has fostered a new form of real-time digital expression, which has in turn created a global sensor network.
“On any given day, Dataminr alerts its clients to numerous relevant events that are either pre-news or off the mainstream radar,” Bailey said. “In recent days, our system surfaced emerging events including a natural disaster in Texas, government sanctions against a major international telecom and an assassination attempt on Arab heads of state.”
The firm’s analytics engine processes public Tweets in the aggregate, detecting linguistic and propagation patterns across the more than 340 million messages—known as tweets—shared on Twitter daily. It then merges tweets with third-party and client proprietary data to perform multi-variable event detection.
Protected tweets from Twitter users who “lock” their accounts so they will not be public, are not included in the feed.
Dataminr recently signed a partnership with Twitter, which includes access to all public Tweets in real-time. Bailey said the company is thrilled to have Twitter’s support and is excited to be able to extract new value in an incredibly rich data-set.
