Thomson Reuters Adds Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tool to Eikon

Following the rising trend of using social media as a source for breaking news on market prices and volatility, Thomson Reuters has developed a tool that takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits, and weighs and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology.

A charting application on the Eikon desktop will give financial professionals a clear picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company as well as advanced technical analysis which enables them to potentially spot market and company-impacting events as they happen.

"Behavioral finance is an area of increasing interest in financial markets. However it has been difficult for human traders to keep pace due to the sheer volume and detail of data and the need to interpret it and spot trends immediately," says Philip Brittan, chief technology officer and global head of platform for financial and risk at Thomson Reuters. "With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualization and analytics tools. This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we plan to do to turn qualitative, unstructured text into quantitative and actionable insight for our customers."

Customers will also have the ability to drill down into the underlying data to investigate further what is being said and by whom.