bankingtech.com

Bloomberg’s twitter feed is designed to help investors make decisions

Bloomberg has added real time Twitter feeds to its Bloomberg Professional service so that market participants can use twitter updates from corporations, executives, governments, media outlets and other sources to help make investment decisions.

The Bloomberg announcement follows a decision earlier this week by US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow companies to use social media for corporate disclosures. Bloomberg classifies tweets by company, asset class, person and topic, so that users can track updates related to specific industries or markets. Users can also create alerts to monitor for unusual bursts of social media chatter about a company.

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” said Jean-Paul Zammitt, head of sales and product development for Bloomberg Professional. “Bloomberg’s platform now provides this ability, along with the high-quality news, data and analytics our users need.”

In total, Bloomberg Professional funnels information from social media channels, corporate announcements, feeds from 1,000 news organisations and content from 90,000 websites. Users can create Twitter filters and alerts, monitor what companies are trending or set alerts for increased levels of social media activity at TWTWR<GO> on the Bloomberg Professional service.

This is not the first time Bloomberg has attempted to integrate social media with financial services. In November last year, the company released its Bloomberg App Portal, which included an app called  Social Media Indicator, built by French company IoSquare, which aggregates social media posts relating to certain stocks or indices and uses them to derive a “sentiment index” for each stock. The ‘sentiment’ can then be plotted on a graph against the actual price of the stocks. In a demonstration seen by Banking Technology, the rise and fall of sentiment on the ‘twitter’ index sometimes preceded the rise and fall of the actual stock – suggesting that, in some cases, social media may be impacting actual price valuations.

Similar ideas have also taken hold at other financial services firms. In January, online trading service DCM Capital has released a trading platform with a social media sentiment feed, allowing traders to incorporate information from channels such as Twitter and Facebook into their trading decisions. Then in February, NYSE Technologies announced that is working on incorporating social media sentiment statistics to its SuperFeed market data service and SFTI network, which should be ready by the end of Q1 this year.