Reuters Announces News Sentiment Analysis to Give Trading Machines Market Insight

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Reuters (LSE:RTR) (NASDAQ:RTRSY) has expanded its machine-readable news offering to include analysis of news sentiment powered by a leading linguistics application from Corpora plc (LSE:CP.).

Reuters system will “read” news articles and score how positive or negative they are. The system will enable customers to analyse news across thousands of companies, far more quickly than can be done by humans. This will enable trading machines to react to market moving news in milliseconds.

It works by assigning numerical “sentiment scores” to words or phrases which are then processed to give an overall positive, neutral or negative score to the company in the news article. These scores can be added together to calculate the prevailing sentiment for a company, a sector, an index - or even to assess global market sentiment.

The new product will be targeted at the high-growth area of algorithmic trading, and will be connected to the widely used Reuters Market Data System platform. It will join Reuters market-leading suite of machine-readable news products which includes:

• Reuters NewsScope Real-time, which allows Reuters clients to use Reuters live news content to drive automated trading and respond to market-moving events as they occur.
• Reuters NewsScope Archive, which lets customers replay stories as they unfolded in the market, allowing them to back-test or fine tune their trading strategies in response.

Peter Moss, Reuters Global Head of Enterprise Solutions said: “This latest release offers the exciting prospect of allowing machines to interpret the sentiment of news stories as they are published, enabling them to react in an informed way to market events at ultra-high speed. Imagine a machine scanning hundreds of stories on companies’ results, measuring the sentiment around them and incorporating that into algorithmic trading strategies. This powerful capability can have a meaningful impact on a client’s portfolio performance.”

Mark Thompson, CEO of Corpora said: "This is a very exciting project in one of the highest growth areas in advanced software. We are delighted to partner with a market leader such as Reuters to leverage our text analysis expertise in inventive ways.”

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About Reuters:

Reuters (www.reuters.com), the global information company, provides indispensable information tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets. Through reuters.com and other digital properties, Reuters now also supplies its trusted content direct to individuals. Reuters drives decision making across the globe based on a reputation for speed, accuracy and independence. Reuters has 16,900 staff in 94 countries, including 2,400 editorial staff in 196 bureaux serving 131 countries. In 2006, Reuters revenues were £2.6 billion.

About Corpora:

Corpora (www.corporasoftware.com) is a 75-person UK AIM-listed company which develops unique software solutions that improve the way organisations manage and use information. Corpora’s world-leading Sentiment Analysis software helps organisations analyse news information more effectively; Enterprise Content Management software enables organisations to capture, store and search documents more effectively; and unique Application Acceleration and Replication technology dramatically improves access to information across geographically distributed organisations. With over 360 clients in a variety of sectors, Corpora serves many of the world’s most information-intensive organisations.