Taming The Big Data Beast

Turning a Deluge of News and Data into Actionable Ideas

With growing volumes, velocity and variety of data, it’s no longer enough for financial services firms to limit their analysis to traditional market data. To unlock the real benefits of Big Data, you need to analyze broader sources, such as unstructured data, and combine that information with existing signals to differentiate and enhance trading, investment, and risk models.

Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) can help you unlock all the potential of big, unstructured data. Through its highly digestible and structured content, you can spot new opportunities, generate greater alpha and outperform by differentiating your strategy from the competition.

Supported by an unparalleled natural language processing system, TRNA empowers you to understand key data attributes such as author sentiment, relevance, novelty (how new or repetitive an item is), and feature identification among a wide variety and massive quantity of unstructured content. It analyzes Reuters News as well as third party sources and Internet content in a consistent, intelligible way to help you generate greater insight.

All that Big Data potential makes Asif Alam, Global Head of Machine Readable News, very excited for the future. According to Alam, “Big data is here to stay, social media channels will continue to grow. Today, there are over 152 million blogs on the Internet and 31% more bloggers than three years ago. And that is only in the blogosphere. Making sense of it all is the only way to gain the edge necessary in today’s markets.” TRNA for Internet News and Social Media is an unprecedented tool that helps you analyze millions of public and premium sources of Internet content, tag and filter that content, and turn big data into actionable analytics. You can profit from an output of quantifiable data points across a number of dimensions including sentiment, relevance and novelty. With TRNA, the financial community can understand not only what is being said, but also how it is being said across all media channels for a much more complete picture.

“For example, you can turn a “big data” challenge into an alpha opportunity by comparing the sentiment of one company against that of its peers or average sentiment in a given sector, view your portfolio based on stock performance rank, and much more.”

Real-time market reactions have become a mandate

According to Aite Group, 35% of quantitative firms are using some kind of machine-readable newsfeed, up from 2% just three years ago. TRNA can scan and analyze stories on thousands of companies in real-time and feed the results into your quantitative strategies giving you an edge over the competition.

Global hedge fund markets need to measure the immeasurable

If you are high frequency firm with the focus of intraday in and out models – supplementing pricing data signals with news sentiment can help you predict earnings surprises. We have seen great examples of cost avoidance also using TRNA content as a circuit breaker or for market makers with widening spreads around unscheduled news events.

Dig deeper into psychological market perceptions

Asif Alam and his Thomson Reuters team are well aware that emotions move markets and psychological states affect how people trade. The key is to harness this information in a systematic way for unique insight and greater opportunity. That’s where MarketPsych Indices comes in. It’s designed to analyze news and social media in real time through emotional indicators, such as Trust, Anger, Gloom, Fear and Uncertainty as well as metrics indicating volume and direction around discussions of key topics including macroeconomic themes, such as Litigation, Mergers, Crop Damage and Social Unrest by region.

These indicators are updated every minute for sectors, regions, countries, commodities and energy topics, indices and currencies. They can be fed directly into spreadsheets or charts that can be monitored by traders or analysts or they can be plugged straight into your algorithms for trading, asset allocation or sector-rotation decisions.

Achieving superior investment returns has never been more challenging. Market competition has never been fiercer. That’s why more and more hedge fund leaders are turning to Thomson Reuters to help harness the power of big data and differentiate their strategies for a real-time competitive edge.

To learn more about how to generate alpha with Thomson Reuters News Analytics and MarketPsych Indices, contact the Hedge Fund team.

Thomson Reuters Global Head of Machine Readable News, Asif Alam is at the forefront of developing new ways to turn big data into actionable ideas.