AI and machine learning on social media data is giving hedge funds a competitive edge

Extracting value from a universe of data, analysing sentiment around company names (equities) or about anything else (macro), is a complex journey and we are only about 5% down that road. The parameters are evolving by which an ever-expanding data set, including the likes of Twitter, pictures, text, video is processed; relying on experts versus the wisdom of the crowd; sentiment derived from a "bag of words", as opposed to structured linguistic analysis. Last week's Unicom conference, AI, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis Applied to Finance (July 14) brought together a group of experts in this area. Professor Gautum Mitra, OptiRisk Systems introduced Elijah DePalma and James Cantarella, Thomson Reuters; Pierce Crosby, StockTwits; Anders Bally, Sentifi; Peter Hafez, RavenPack; Stephen Morse, Twitter. DePalma differed somewhat from the others because the Thomson Reuters sentiment engine uses only accredited Reuters news data, rather than raw social media chatter.