WP/ By
From a trading desk in London,
Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter
posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective
mood of the populace.
The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score
from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be
from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent
Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for
private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he
generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short.
Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first
quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals,
companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the
unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say
analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news
faster than traditional investment approaches.
The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM.
“Big
data,” as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable
that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed
it a new class of economic asset, like oil.
“Business boundaries
are being redrawn,” the report said. Companies with the ability to mine
the data are becoming the most powerful, it added.
While the human
brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in
computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease
out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing
trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and
other expressions of daily life.
“This is changing the world in a
big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and
make decisions in a way we haven’t been able to ever before,” said Gary
King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder
of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston.
The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment
about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of
flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search.
And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that
analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across
Latin America.
Many questions about big data remain unanswered.
Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can
ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that
savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends
and manipulate markets.
Even so, sociologists, software engineers,
economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are
jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative
as it has been in finance. More >>
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario