
AP financial stories written and published by an automated system - antouank
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots-financial-reporting
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vonnik
I used to work for a financial news service. The Fed's interest rate
announcements were automated; they hit the wire service, which had an
automated template to push out headlines on the news (human oversight but not
much intervention); and the high-speed traders had NLP to interpret the
headlines, place a bet and move the market, generating more news for automated
headlines. The circle was complete.

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IgorPartola
I came here to say exactly this. I can only imagine how the news will look
after being through the ringer a few times. Also, do these systems have any
cycle detection so that the same story is not retold over and over?

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harmegido
Well it'd all be news. Here's the steps:

1) Fed makes announcement (news generated)

2) Machine traders read news and make appropriate trades

3) Markets move (if big enough, news generated)

4) Machine traders see markets move, possibly make appropriate trades

5) Markets move again (if big enough, news generated

Each movement in the markets, if it were big enough to be news worthy, would
generate a news event. That is ok, because news readers would want to know
about large market movements (well other news readers would - I really
wouldn't). It's up to the traders to decide if they want to keep
buying/selling.

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mring33621
A nice positive feedback cycle!

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arethuza
The next step would them presumably be to automate the consumption of these
articles. Then once you've done that why not cut out the need for natural
language and simply agree on some formal language that encodes the contents of
the article in some way that makes it easy to process.

Given that financial articles are usually of a few standard formats I wonder
how far you could go with some kind of "Financial Statement Modelling
Language"?

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harperlee
Like XBRL?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL)

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arethuza
That looks like an XML format for standard financial reports (balance sheet,
P&L etc.) - what I was thinking about is something more general and more
"event-based": acquisitions, divestments, new products etc.

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harperlee
Well significant events that may impact on the price of the stock should be
communicated officialy, so for those kinds of things I think it should be
feasible. Buy I'm no expert on it, though!

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mratzloff
I see someone watched Hasan Minhaj's report on this topic on The Daily Show
last night.

For the curious: [http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fh76l0/the-daily-show-with-
tre...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fh76l0/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-
robot-journalists)

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jagermo
Combine that with high frequency trading analysis and you have a nice target
for someone who wants to shake up the world of finance a litte.

I'm not against something like that, but if you don't have a human oversight
somewhere you are bound to run into trouble. Just look what happens when a
twitter account gets compromised.

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harmegido
There was a huge market movement on a hacked AP tweet claiming Obama was
injured/under attack a while ago. If you're doctor evil, this is your new best
way to make a lot of money. The appropriate regulatory body would probably
notice a bunch of activity in way out of the money options prior to something
like that though.

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vittore
How I would build thing like that myself? Machine learning?

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dontscale
presumably the way you'd write a table-based report by interpreting some raw
data source, but you'd use natural language for the presentation. i could see
a.i. coming into play with subjective stories, but earnings reports can be
written very objectively.

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njharman
And I'm sure there are financial institutions with Natural Language systems
trying to "read" these stories.

Humans just get in the way.

