Joe Furey, Bloomberg
Consultant, visited Dr. Krause’s FinTech Topics course and the students learned
about the powerful news and social media data scrapping tools within Bloomberg
On Wednesday,
February 6, 2019, Dr. David Krause (AIM Program Director) and the students in the
FinTech Topics course met with Joe Furey of Bloomberg.
Dr. Krause said, “With
the increased news and social media volume and time sensitivity of
understanding the implications of breaking media stories and posts, as financial
analysts it is necessary to access actionable information quickly. Joe showed
us various ways to access data on the Bloomberg and to automate the processing
of extracting usable information.”
Using blogs, tweets
and other unstructured textual information presents challenges that are can be
best handled by machine-learning techniques. The students learned how Bloomberg
has applied such techniques to identify a news story or tweet as being relevant
for an individual stock ticker and to assign a sentiment score to each story or
tweet in the feed.
The students will
soon be receiving an assignment where they will access Bloomberg and utilize
the news and social sentiment data from historical and real-time news flows. Mr.
Furey explained Bloomberg’s process for scrapping and amassing data - and how
their models automatically assign a probability of the news sentiment being positive,
negative or neutral to each news story or tweet.
Bloomberg provides
two types of sentiment analytics: story-level sentiment and company-level
sentiment. The students had an opportunity to ‘test drive’ Bloomberg on
specific company tickers and to view how the stock’s performance appears to
follow the breaking of stories on blogs or social media.
It will be interesting
to see what the students learn from their assignments about the predictive power
of big data and its relationship to future stock performance.
