Text Analysis for Trading: Moving the Ball Forward

Text analysis for trading and investing: this is area where I've spent a lot of calories over the past few years.  A significant amount of progress has been made in this area, and it is receiving increasing attention as the markets become ever-more competitive, "information overload" gets worse every day and technologies for performing entity extraction and sentiment measurement get better and better. These are hard technical problems to solve and require money, experience with the data and domain expertise, three attributes that are not often found in the same firm.

So after hearing rumblings over the past few months, it was just announced the Reuters is acquiring the Israeli text analysis company ClearForest for $30 million. Each has moved the ball forward in their own way and now they will try to advance it even further as a team. It is very validating that a company like Reuters would see the value in a firm like ClearForest; clearly this small band of technical experts has something to contribute to helping Reuters manage and display its content. I look forward to watching their progress over the ensuing months and years.

Congratulations to Tom Glocer and Barak Pridor on this union of two smart teams and interesting companies.

Comments

[Wisocan]

To get an idea of how some of this might start to come together - take a look at ClearForest's Gnosis Firefox plugin - on the fly semantic processing of web content. It's at http://gnosis.clearforest.com.

[Yaser Anwar]

Sir:

Given the plethora of content available on the net, which grows every day, will Monitor give a few similar to what Reuters plans?

Given your info-rich posts on gaming, the AI could detect whether the tone is a + or -ve.

I'm assuming it would be better for Monitor to team up with a rival agency (AP, Thomson?) and package the product together.