The pre-referendum discussions reminded me of the fact that we have more and more noise in the markets. For me, this was a great time to look into the value of sentiment analysis, which overlaps with Artificial intelligence, Big Data analytics, and the wisdom of the crowd. All three domains are present in financial markets sentiment analysis and tools.

The world is global; the world is chaotic in that a butterfly movement in Japan can initiate a tornado in the West. The world interacts, consumes, and learns from the web. The unstructured data produced is mind-boggling.

We are just now starting to appreciate the value from paying attention to the amount of data out there, to the sensitivity of the entire system (in the scientific sense of chaos theory; i.e. small changes in parameters can have large effects), and to the value of processing this information.

What is sentiment analysis in financial markets?

Web crawling in twitter feeds on anything related to economics and markets, is what most people think. Others imagine, parsing the bulk of financial media content. At a broader level, one may add non-financial content that is related to economics (like politics, or social trends, or corporate relationships etc).

It’s all about data or relationships from online sources; social media, news, research, visuals.

The Fintechs involved in this space are either designing tools (i.e. algorithms) that can extract value from any of these sources; or they are overlaying them with other analytics. Some are B2B and some are B2C.

Simply Wall St from Australia is a B2C Fintech focused on visualization and info graphics of stocks. Their Snowflake visuals are enticing and check them out.

Amareos from Hong Kong, contributes with heat maps and data visualization. Their distinct granular approach to sentiments and emotions (a dozen different types) and thei in-house research reports based on their insights; are worth checking out.

Heckyl, out of India, is processing a large database of stocks and news, and applying sentiment-tagging, news-clustering and using a discovery engine. Their three products separate sentiments from news, from prices, and their “specialty” is sentiment coverage for private companies.

Last stop before heading over to Europe

TipRanks from Israel, is a platform that ranks financial analysts and bloggers and their stock recommendations. That allows others, like I know First, to perform sentiment analysis using TipRanks approach and from that construct a portfolio. Seeking Alpha, obviously is a top “contributor” to the shaping of these sentiments.

Sentifi, is a Swiss based company that uses crowd sourcing algorithms to provide actionable investment advice to large financial institutions and to financial media companies. They have chosen to have a couple of regionally-focused versions and they offer different products (myMarkets; myPublishing, myCompany, myScore) for individual, business, content.

Sentiment analysis for trading and risk management

Acuity Trading (B2C) is a UK based company offering widgets (the Radial Gauge) with sentiment data, plug &play integrations to trading platforms and bespoke solutions.

Yuka Lab, German based, for retail traders and professionals, with three products: SentiTrade, Senticomm, Portoflio Simulator

StockPulse another German based, sentiment analysis company who is offering their signaling services to traders (both retail and professionals)

SemLab is a Dutch company that serves other industries too beyond the financial sector. They showcase a dozen (!) services that target market risk, or asset specific risk, or news and analytics combinations. They are positioned in the broader Big Data space and not only for financials.

EagleAlpha is an Irish company, their focus is on parsing news, info, research from the investment world and towards alpha generation.

Generic sentiment analysis and with a customer-centric focus

Aylien from Dublin is focused on extracting sentiment from text; their positioning is to customer-centric companies that can extract value from sentiment analysis.

TheySay (UK), have also broader focus beyond financial markets and a similar focus on sentiment analysis around customer. They offer an OpenAPI.

Sentiment analysis is at the very early stages of being integrated in financial institutions. I see more of that integration in the US and I will touch upon it in the sequel post Sentiment Fintechs in the US.

I will devote a separate post to the financial institutions that are starting to integrate sentiment analysis in their business (either for their in-house research and risk management or for customer facing tools).

Daily Fintech Advisers provides strategic consulting to organizations with business and investment interests in Fintech & operates the Fintech Genome P2P Knowledge Network. Efi Pylarinou is a Digital Wealth Management thought leader.