Oh great. The robots are now on social media. A Boston based analytics firm - Crimson Hexagon - has collected, indexed and stored a trillion plus posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc since its formation in 2008. Why you ask? Well, it is designed to get 'predictive data' (which says it all) that can be used for.................predicting stuff. Like potential movie box office success, how an event may be perceived by the public AND.........PREDICTING STOCK MOVEMENTS. So now the AI (artificial intelligence) group and their gang of robot minions are our Facebook friends and learning our stock picking conversations. Remember, if that Facebook profile doesn't have a picture it may be a robot.
(Bill Taylor/CEO)
"You may not have heard of Crimson Hexagon, but the chances are it's heard of you.
Since it launched in 2008, the Boston-based analytics firm has collected, stored, and indexed over a trillion public posts from Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram to create the world's largest database of its kind...
Predicting stock movements
Most of its client base is consumer-facing firms, but the firm also works with asset managers to predict trends in company earnings and stock movements.
"Every day I sit with asset managers, and we ask which firm is reporting earnings in the next week or so. We ask what can we find on social media that might inform us about their earnings. We’ve come up with some really interesting predictive data," she says.
Samsung Note 7 fires
Take the media storm that followed reports of Samsung's Note 7 mobile phones catching fire last year: it caused a big media storm, but Crimson Hexagon found that people on social media weren't talking about it a corresponding amount.
"Samsung’s stock went down at the height of the problem they had. But we looked at the social media data and actually, people weren’t talking about it very much."
Using a paper portfolio — a form of simulated stock trading without actual money involved — the firm short-sold Samsung stock, a trade which Newby says "played out extremely well..."
Source: BusinessInsider