The value of financial journalism to traders

Tom Groenfeldt of Forbes.com writes Thursday about the value of financial journalism to the markets after listening to Joe Lanza, the president of Dow Jones Financial Markets, speak at the SIFMA securities industry conference about the work of its 100 journalists.

Groenfeldt writes, “Some news, such as unemployment figures and the consumer price index, is relatively easy to distribute in numerical terms. But for company news, Dow Jones is working with sentiment which it tries to measure in terms of positive, negative or neutral depending on words used and where they occur in the story.

“‘Companies will often bury certain information in tables.’ Readers no doubt will be shocked to learn that such behavior occurs in financial reporting but apparently it does.

“Since Dow Jones has been around awhile, it has an archive of 40 years of every story that has been published the Wall Street Journal, on the wire, and in Barron’s — so clients can back test to their hearts’ content. It is also adding 15,000 items per day from its current reporting.

“One result is that the percentage of firms making some use of unstructured data has grown from around 5 percent in 2008 to over 30 percent. That suggests firms are still learning to use it. Lanza said they might develop trading strategies that work around numbers — if the CPI increases a certain percent then trading engines would sell one part of the market and buy another.  If the number hits a different marker, it could generate a different trading strategy.”

Read more here.