Bloomberg has again confirmed what was well known: algorithms scour Twitter daily, looking for material and content to trade. Now, in an attempt to further streamline and encourage this, Bloomberg is creating a Twitter stream specifically for finance and specifically for algorithms.
Bloomberg has figured out what most people in the trading community have known for years: that Twitter is an invaluable asset for traders and those in the financial industry. Not only are company disclosures made through the social media site, but "FinTwit", as it as it is commonly known, is full of industry participants – ranging from analysts to investors to hedge fund managers – and they all like to use Twitter as a platform to provide their analysis, and best of all, they do it for free, handing over their content to Twitter in some vain hope of influencing others and/or acquiring transitory recognition and fame.
Prominent hedge fund managers like David Einhorn, Carl Icahn and Jeffrey Gundlach all are active Twitter users, sometimes using the platform to shoot out their thoughts on individual companies or their macro economic outlook. All of the financial media journalists are active on Twitter. Even CEOs and company executives are frequently quoted by their Tweets, as one electric car CEO found out last weekend.
Bloomberg started to cover tweets on the terminal back in 2013, confirming Twitter's usefulness to finance professionals. Anybody that looks for news on a company may also be subjected to tweets related to the company, verbatim, as they appear on Twitter, from notable analysts and respected names in the industry.
Today, Bloomberg took its partnership with Twitter one step further.
The company announced on Wednesday morning that it will be providing a Twitter-specific financial newsfeed tailored to algorithms. In a press release dated Wednesday morning morning, the company noted:
Bloomberg announced today the expansion of its relationship with Twitter, launching a real-time feed of curated Twitter data, so that enterprise clients can incorporate the most financially relevant content into their trading algorithms. Built on the back of Bloomberg's robust Natural Language Processing techniques and available through the company's Event-Driven Feeds (EDF) product, the data allows financial firms to extract value by making sense of the over 500 million Tweets per day.
The use of Twitter for disclosing material company news has increased since 2013, when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provided guidance on doing so. Twitter also continues to be the service of choice for influential financial professionals to broadcast market-moving views. Yet, the financial industry struggles with the sheer volume of Twitter content, which can create a lag in market reaction and introduce unnecessary risks when making trading decisions.
Tony McManus, Bloomberg Enterprise Data CIO, said that "our customers tell us that Twitter data is a vital part of their information-driven trading strategies, helping them uncover early trends and changes in sentiment."...