Dow Jones builds news machine aimed at asset managers

Mary Campbell of FINAlternatives writes about Lexicon, a new reading machine from Dow Jones & Co. for asset managers.

Campbell writes, “Lexicon examines massive volumes of Dow Jones real-time news, identifying crucial words and phrases that signal trends or patterns. The words are analyzed for sentiment, frequency and other relevant analytics based upon proprietary dictionaries that determine the ‘tone’ of the news. According to the firm, researchers and traders can then use this data to build customized indicators and deploy them as part of trading models.

“The idea, says Rob Passarella, vice president and managing director of institutional markets at Dow Jones & Co., came from the company’s work with academics.

“‘We had been working with academics in the past,’ Passarella told FINalternatives, ‘Many academics like to use what we call our text feed… to actually get our content and do analysis of it. So it pretty much started… with a few guys who wanted to do that, to do some textual content analysis and one of the gentlemen was a guy by the name of Paul Tetlock, who is now at Columbia University.'”

Read more here.