Thomson Reuters has launched its news sentiment data, including a sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds, to its financial markets desktop Eikon.

Through charting applications, the new data will provide financial markets professionals with intuitive ways of identifying trends and potential signals in huge amounts of unstructured data, gaining unique insight and competitive advantage.

Eikon takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weights and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology.

The charting application gives 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.

The feed incorporates identified key influencers as well as a broad cross-section of all activity to provide a unique and powerful picture of global Twitter sentiment at any given time.

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

The analysis is based on the company’s Thomson Reuters News Analytics solution, an advanced service for automating the consumption and systematic analysis of news.

The data is overlaid by company share prices in a visual format to give financial professionals an idea of how average sentiment is evolving over time and impacting market prices, making it easy to spot key trends in the data.

Danielle Tierney at Aite Group, said: “The ability to incorporate social media into the analytics toolkit is becoming an increasingly frequent demand from today’s generation of traders.

“Such functionality is no longer just a value-add, but is well on its way to becoming an important part of many quantitative strategies. The real differentiator is usability, or how this data is then harnessed to present financial professionals with an easily-digestible picture of market trends.” - TradeArabia News Service