Thomson Reuters introduces sentiment data for competitive advantage

Through powerful charting applications, the new data provides financial markets professionals with quick and intuitive ways of identifying trends and potential signals in huge amounts of unstructured data, gaining unique insight and competitive advantage.

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.

News sentiment across 30,000 listed companies

To cater to growing interest in the industry, Eikon takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weights and analyses sentiment, using a proprietary methodology. The charting application gives financial professionals a clear picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company and advanced technical analysis that 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 unique and powerful 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.

In addition, the recently introduced news sentiment analysis is based on the company's award-winning solution, one of the industry's most advanced services for automating the consumption and systematic analysis of news. It uses a proprietary system of sentiment scoring to provide a rolling average score for news sentiment that is more digestible to humans across over 30,000 listed companies. This data is overlaid by company share prices in a visual format to give financial professionals an idea of how average sentiment is evolving over time and influencing market prices, making it easy to spot key trends in the data.

"The ability to incorporate social media into the analytics toolkit is becoming an increasingly frequent demand from today's generation of traders," said analyst Danielle Tierney at Aite Group. "Such functionality is no longer just a value-add, but is 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."

Behavioural finance

"Behavioural finance is an area of increasing interest in financial markets. However it has been difficult for human traders to keep pace due to the 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. "With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon, we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualisation and analytics tools. This is 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."

These latest additions come at a time when the company is making significant changes to the user interface that are designed to ensure that Eikon is always available across the customer's entire workflow, no matter what application they are working in. From the beginning, it has been designed to provide a powerful and intuitive next-generation solution for consuming real-time and historical data, connecting with the financial markets community and executing financial markets transactions across asset classes such as foreign exchange (FX), fixed income, commodities, equities and derivatives. It realises the company's vision for a financial markets desktop that is connected, informed, intelligent and open and provides access to a messaging community of over 200,000 financial professionals.

For more information, go to http://thomsonreuters.com.