Client: Social Market Analytics (SMA) is a financial analytics firm specializing in social media data analysis. The platform uses qualitative and quantitative methods to provide actionable market sentiment data to investors, enabling them to mitigate risks, enhance returns, and discover new trading opportunities.
Challenge: Strategic Systems International (SSI) has been SMA’s primary technology partner since early 2011. The challenge was to convert large volumes of Twitter data into statistically reliable metrics that capture true financial market sentiments.
Solution: SSI’s architects and developers brought SMA’s vision to life through a robust, user-friendly web-based application. SSI defined the technology roadmap, executed comprehensive front-end development, and built reliable APIs for delivering financial data in intuitive charting formats. The solution involved converting extensive social media data into actionable S-Factor values.
- Extractor: The Extractor gathers data on the client’s stock universe from social media sources via Twitter and GNIP APIs, polling Twitter every minute. It continuously updates the universe list, adaptively polling for current content relevant to the securities in the message stream.
- Evaluator: The Evaluator filters out spam and duplicates, analyzing each tweet for relevance to the client’s stock universe. It uses proprietary natural language processing algorithms to assess tweets, refining insights based on the content and characteristics of the tweet authors to gauge professional investor sentiment.
- Calculator: The Calculator computes sentiment signatures for each stock in the client’s universe. It processes indicative tweets through bucketing and weighting, grouping them by time periods. The Normalization and Scoring process calculates the S-Score™ and other S-Factors™ for each entity with active content.
Result: SSI’s solution enabled SMA to provide real-time investor sentiment alerts, fueling its growth from a startup to a highly profitable company. SMA’s success led to partnerships with major firms like StockTwits, Markit, the New York Stock Exchange, Deltix, OneMarketData, and EOTPRO Developments, expanding its influence in financial analytics.
