You know how there are some people in the DealBreaker audience who like to leave comments about how media people know nothing about finance and we should go back to where we came from and, “Hey, at what address can I send my underwear to for Keith Hahn?” A lot of those readers will probably be somewhat ticked off to hear that a bevy of financial journalists will now not only make your blood pressure raise with “how frighteningly little [they] know about how things work on Wall Street” but actually affect things that happen on Wall Street. Still with us? Reuters introduced a new “sentiment analysis” feature today in which computers will read their articles, decided whether they are positive or negative and then trigger trades based on those results. FINalternatives reports that the new service “allows the machines to interpret the sentiment of news stories as they are published,” i.e. faster than your average trader.
Numerical “sentiment scores” are assigned to the words and phrases in the article and then totaled to give a positive, negative or neutral report card to the company in question. Does anyone else find it a bit disconcerting that Bess Levin or her counterpart at Reuters could be triggering hedge fund trades, based on the fact that she chose to write a scathing article about Apple, after her brand new Mac Book crashed for the third time in six weeks?

Reuters Gets Sentimental [FINalternatives]