November 27th, 2006
We spent over a year working exclusively with Wall Street firms, and now a couple of the largest sell-side investment banks and over 60 hedge funds use our service. This group of customers is EXTREMELY demanding, so it has been a great place to refine our technology.
Here is what we’ve learned about traders. They need their info to be:
- absolutely comprehensive (“don’t miss anything”),
- timely (“I need it in real-time”),
- appropriately filtered (“just give me the important stuff”)
- and granular by topic (“those guys care about fuel-cells, I only care about Xbox”).
We offer traders a choice of interfaces: email alerts, datafeeds, GUI’s or little widgets that don’t take up much room on your screen.
Or New Media sources are the most comprehensive in the business: Blogs, boards, forums, social networking sites, websites, local news sources, international news sources, trade rags, and we even throw in mainstream news as well.
The technology platform we use is an extension of similar business intelligence tools many of us created together in a previous company. Most of us have been working on the problem of filtering unstructured information for 8 years. Our CTO has a patent related to it.
We take a bottoms up approach. “Scraping the blogosphere” simply doesn’t work – we find many more obscure nuggets using our approach. If people are telling you different, they actually don’t understand the problem. We build “TopicNets” that continuously track activity around the things you actually care about.
Ranking the results in some sort of informed way has been the main problem we’ve been working recently. We can use a variety of approaches, from “relevance” to “credibility of the author” to “topicality” to “level of influence”. Again, we give the traders the ability to rank results differently depending on what is important.
Filtering New Media information is a tough problem. But finding one good nugget that no one else has can generate one killer trade…..
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