Recent Developments

Recent Developments

Financial market news is now being formatted by firms such as Need To Know News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg, to be read and traded on via algorithms.

"Computers are now being used to generate news stories about company earnings results or economic statistics as they are released. And this almost instantaneous information forms a direct feed into other computers which trade on the news."

The algorithms do not simply trade on simple news stories but also interpret more difficult to understand news. Some firms are also attempting to automatically assign sentiment (deciding if the news is good or bad) to news stories so that automated trading can work directly on the news story

"Increasingly, people are looking at all forms of news and building their own indicators around it in a semi-structured way," as they constantly seek out new trading advantages said Rob Passarella, global director of strategy at Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. His firm provides both a low latency news feed and news analytics for traders. Passarella also pointed to new academic research being conducted on the degree to which frequent Google searches on various stocks can serve as trading indicators, the potential impact of various phrases and words that may appear in Securities and Exchange Commission statements and the latest wave of online communities devoted to stock trading topics.

"Markets are by their very nature conversations, having grown out of coffee houses and taverns", he said. So the way conversations get created in a digital society will be used to convert news into trades, as well, Passarella said.

“There is a real interest in moving the process of interpreting news from the humans to the machines” says Kirsti Suutari, global business manager of algorithmic trading at Reuters. "More of our customers are finding ways to use news content to make money."

An example of the importance of news reporting speed to algorithmic traders was an advertising campaign by Dow Jones (appearances included page W15 of the Wall Street Journal, on March 1, 2008) claiming that their service had beaten other news services by 2 seconds in reporting an interest rate cut by the Bank of England.

In July 2007, Citigroup, which had already developed its own trading algorithms, paid $680 million for Automated Trading Desk, a 19-year-old firm that trades about 200 million shares a day. Citigroup had previously bought Lava Trading and OnTrade Inc.