A big part of my approach to understanding the market is to explore the edges, and one of the edges is information arbitrage—where social media analysis meets investment research. Think of a portfolio manager or analyst using social media intelligence to analyze investments and find trading signals. It'a pretty easy to understand the ROI in that application, and it's the kind of application that may just get your CFO's attention.
I've talked with people with some interesting approaches to this specialized market, and I recently started a project to categorize the strategies in the market. There are a number of different angles in play, which makes it a particularly interesting space:
- Atomic Intelligence
- ClearForest
- Connotate
- FirstRain
- InfoNgen
- Jodange
- Palantir
- Ravenpack
- SkyGrid
- Stock Sonar (Digital Trowel)
- StockMood
Given recent trends in financial markets, I've decided to prioritize other projects, but I expect to come back to this one (so if I missed your company, let me know). It's a potent reminder that there's more to social media than marketing and communications.
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Nathan,
This is exactly what we're doing with our ThomsonReuters relationship - automated trading systems using sentiment analysis of news coming thru the wires as part of the buy/sell process. Very cool stuff, and you're right about social media being more than marketing and communications.
Cheers,
Christine
Thanks, Christine. I'll be sure to follow up with you on that when I restart the project.
Great compilation! We've experienced quite an increase in interest with anticipated changes to regulations coming and the growing discussions in Social Media on public companies - including Small Cap stocks.
Nathan,
Very refreshing reading this. We have been performing exhaustive text analytics on all popular social media streams including Twitter and Facebook for the last 2 years quite successfully, our coverage extends to over 60,000 active blogs and over 300,000 consumer-active sites, giving us not only a very large segment of the online populace to cover in various niche markets but also an ever increasing training set to test our processes against.
Our clients benefit from live access to our Analytics Engine, Business Reports and are provide us the essential feedback that we use to extend our capabilities every day.
The Social Web is one of the most intensely morphing textual corpus on the planet, and the sheer volume of contextual connectivity it offers will one day allow near-human levels of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, something we'd like to be around to achieve in time to come and have set since day one as our primary business goal.
A pleasure reading your thoughts. Please do feel free to contact us should you be interested in availing our expertise in the field.
All the best~