Users of Thomson Reuters Eikon can now analyze news sentiment data including sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds with its new update.
The update boasts enhanced charting applications that aim to provide traders with quick ways of identifying trends and potential signals in huge amounts of unstructured data, gaining unique insight and competitive advantage, according to a company press statement.
According to Reuters: The practice of tracking news and social media sentiment to gauge and predict the impact of breaking news on market prices and volatility has been gaining popularity over the past five years with Aite Group estimating that over 50% of quantitative firms are now using machine readable news feeds. However the data provided via such feeds has been historically too detailed to be digested easily by human traders.
Thomson Reuters Eikon now takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weighs and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology. The charting application aims to give a clear picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company as well as advanced technical analysis which enables them to potentially spot market and company-impacting events as they happen.
The feed incorporates identified key influencers as well as a broad cross-section of all activity to provide a picture of global Twitter sentiment at any given time. Customers also have the ability to drill down into the underlying data to investigate further what is being said and by whom.
The ability to incorporate social media into the analytics toolkit is becoming an increasingly frequent demand from todays generation of traders, said analyst Danielle Tierney at Aite Group. Such functionality is no longer just a value-add, but is well on its way to becoming an important part of many quantitative strategies. The real differentiator is usability, or how this data is then harnessed to present financial professionals with an easily-digestible picture of market trends.
Behavioral finance is an area of increasing interest in financial markets. However it has been difficult for human traders to keep pace due to the sheer volume and detail of data and the need to interpret it and spot trends immediately, said Philip Brittan, chief technology officer and global head of platform for Financial and Risk, Thomson Reuters.
He adds, With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualization and analytics tools. This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we plan to do to turn qualitative, unstructured text into quantitative and actionable insight for our customers.