Are you a machine?
9 Jun 2010:
Nothing personal, but I am just checking because there are now two specific “machine readable” news services from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg which point to the increasing trend for businesses to use software to filter, aggregate and analyse the mass of news that hits us every day. These services are aimed at traders to help them rapidly sift through the fire-hose of news by adding specialised tags to the news feeds. These tags allow programmes to pull out and analyse specific buy and sell signals which can then be use as input into their trading decisions. Take the scenario, for example, where a trader is about to execute a trade to buy a significant amount of a company’s shares. A programme reading the news feed could alert them of a newly breaking adverse news story that may impact the price. For braver institutions, they could even plug this information directly into trading algorithms. However, they would need to trust not only the news feed, but also their ways of interpreting the type of news and its impact.
Outside of the heady world of real-time trading, we at MPI use specially configured software to distil and analyse news from data feeds for both website and internal uses. For those interested in the more technical aspects of this topic, there are also now specific databases, such as MarkLogic, that allow for the storage of unstructured data for uses including financial research. These feeds and tools typically use eXensible Markup Language (XML), or its derivatives such as RIXML (research information exchange markup language), RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or XBRL (extensible business reporting language) to provide a standard mechanism for the framework and to “tag” or encode this information for machine usage.
So whilst the web means that there is ever more information competing for our attention, it is also clear that by the intelligent use of tools it is possible to turn this issue into an advantage – allowing us to have easier access to more relevant information.
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