By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Wall Street Journal 6/21/10
Watch out, stock pickers.
To make stock predictions, the program does what is known as “text mining” — scanning large volumes of content and analyzing the words in it. Computer-aided quantitative funds already are plentiful, but they analyze numerical data rather than text. The new program is different because it attempts to simulate what has traditionally been a human activity.
“Our approach is more like the analyst approach, simulated by a program,” said Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, in an interview with Digits. “You have an analyst reading papers, looking for clues that others have not observed.”
The program, which was first reported by MIT’s Technology Review, scans stock prices and financial news and buys or shorts stocks it believes will move more than 1% in the next 20 minutes. The system sells the stocks after 20 minutes.
“When you do long-term predictions, there are many variables,” Dr. Chen said. “But … you can have an advantage if you look at five minutes, 10 minutes.”
In evaluating the meaning of a single news item, “the system won’t be as accurate as an individual analyst,” Dr. Chen said. “The computer is maybe 80 to 85% accurate when analyzing text, but it can read maybe 100,000 times the amount of data.” He said the amount of data being analyzed is one thing that would make it difficult to game the system.
Link to complete article
Grandpa: The SEC has yet to wrap their arms around High Frequency Traders, Dark Pools and Front Running and now Artificial Intelligence is rounding the corner. Welcome to the U.S. Equity market; you know the market that basically lost their clients 20% from 2000 to 2010 while raking in BILLIONS in bonuses.
Suggested staffing changes at the SEC
(maybe then Main Street has a chance)
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