Thomson Reuters Launches Social Media Sentiment Analysis Offering

New York -Thomson Reuters today announced an extension of its machine-readable news offering to include a sentiment scoring service for social media. The new capability will mine the expansive wealth of social media and blog content to deliver digestible analytics on selected companies and market segments, to help trading and investment firms identify and capitalize on new opportunities.

The impact of social media has expanded beyond personal use. Financial markets have seen a dramatic rise in the volume and influence of industry blogs, social-networking and commentary websites. According to Aite Group 35% of quantitative firms are using some kind of machine readable newsfeed, up from 2% just three years ago.

Thomson Reuters News Analytics enables clients to leverage a unique set of analytics such as sentiment, relevance and novelty indicators that capture market opinion, for algorithmic trading systems as well as risk management and human decision support processes. Today's launch provides access on up to 50,000 news sites and four million social media sites, and allows customers to quickly sift through the noise to better interpret the extensive amount of available data on the internet.

The service utilizes information delivered by Moreover Technologies, an aggregator of global news and social media, to create intelligent information clients need to power their trading strategies. Thomson Reuters News Analytics software is available as a deployed solution or can be hosted in Elektron, the firm's high performance data and trading infrastructure.

Rich Brown, head of quantitative and event driven trading solutions, Thomson Reuters, said: "Investment firms are embracing new data, tools and techniques to help make sense of the massive amounts of unstructured data available on the Internet. When properly analyzed and understood, this data can complement a firm's trading and investment strategies and give it a competitive edge. This launch will give investors additional capabilities to gauge stock, sector, and market sentiment, and to translate these emerging sources of market insight into data that can be incorporated into both quantitative strategies and as a way to provide a broader context to human analysts."

Paul Farrell, president, Moreover Technologies, said: "Organizations need the ability to rapidly collate and analyze an increasing number of opinion-forming media sources. We are excited to be working with Thomson Reuters to bring trading firms the most current and actionable social media information on which they can make more informed decisions and maximize the performance of their trading strategies."

Thomson Reuters News Analytics offers a bottoms-up approach to analyze and provide sentiment on individual companies as well as commodity and energy topics. Data can be aggregated at the stock, sector, market, and country levels to track sentiment on desired parameters. Customers have the ability to filter the available content to hone in on specific information sources they want to target and leverage analytic tools to spot trends and anomalies.