USA Today – #Tweet this: To gain a trading edge, Wall Street traders are now using clever computer programs to monitor and decode the words, opinions, rants and even keyboard-generated smiley faces posted on social-media sites like Twitter.com.
“We are in the early stages of a gold rush,” says Johan Bollen, a professor of informatics at Indiana University and co-author of the study linking Twitter mood measurement to stock market performance. “If you would have told anyone 10 years ago that this data would be available, they would have called it science-fiction. We know that emotions play a significant role in markets,” he says. Analyzing millions of tweets is akin to a “large-scale emotional thermometer for society as a whole.”
Online surveillance of social-networking sites is emerging as a must-have tool for hedge funds, big banks, high-frequency traders and black-box investment firms that run money via computer programs. The goal: to gather market intelligence from previously untapped sources.
