Written : uspankowski
Sources : News Strait Times
Today’s business life has become fast and tremendously influenced by information and communication technology (ICT). ICT assists us in many situations of everyday’s working life thus making it much more convenient. However, with technology comes complexity. This also accounts for the financial domain where ICT developments have dramatically changed the landscape over the past two decades. Nowadays, information gathering, processing, and transferring happen within milliseconds all over the globe. Not only the speed and the amount of information being processed have changed but also the multitude and character of information sources. Besides traditional information service providers offering a huge variety of structured financial data, social media information channels such as Twitter, Facebook, or web blogs have emerged. “Information 2.0” transmitted by these sources may not be as accurate as professional analysis or structured information but contain another very important feature: the sentiment of the market.
Obviously, the importance of market sentiment for conducting financial business is constantly increasing. The first hedge funds started to trade on Twitter news in May 2011: “The fund will use the ‘fear and greed’ aspect of financial markets, as determined by what people tweet, in order to make its moves. It will access 10% of Twitter’s firehose to assess whether people’s sentiments are generally positive or negative in order to predict the movement of the stock market.” (www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter)
The detection and exploitation of hidden, not yet processed information that can possibly influence financial markets are hereby the key motivation for the FIRST project. FIRST does not only address a single information source to collect large amounts of heterogeneous information but rather aims to use the whole web as its playground.
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