Thomson Reuters has boosted processing on its flagship Eikon desktop, including search, sentiment analysis and data visualizations.

The search capabilities include support for natural language queries. Search has also been extended to Microsoft Excel, enabling financial professionals to surface data indulging fundamentals and key performance indicators.

“Eikon is a single desktop for financial data and risk management,” said Albert Lojko, global head of platform product at Thomson Reuters. “Our objective is to redefine the financial desktop through a focus on design, the whole workflow and interactions. We’ve taken search to new levels with natural language and graph search for natural language users. We’ve brought out a lot of visualization tools to help users sift through large amounts of data. In some cases, you can animate the visuals.”

The practice of tracking news and social media sentiment to gauge and predict the impact of breaking news on market prices and volatility has been gaining popularity over the past five years with Aite Group estimating that over 50% of quantitative firms are now using machine readable news feeds. However the data provided via such feeds has been historically too detailed to be digested easily by human traders.

By adding news sentiment data to Eikon, including sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds, Thomson Reuters enables financial markets professionals to identify trends and potential signals in huge amounts of unstructured data, gaining insight and competitive advantage.

“The ability to incorporate social media into the analytics toolkit is becoming an increasingly frequent demand from today’s generation of traders,” said analyst Danielle Tierney at Aite Group. “Such functionality is no longer just a value-add, but is well on its way to becoming an important part of many quantitative strategies. The real differentiator is usability, or how this data is then harnessed to present financial professionals with an easily-digestible picture of market trends.”

Eikon takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weights and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology. The charting application gives financial professionals a picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company as well as advanced technical analysis which enables them to potentially spot market and company-impacting events as they happen.

“Behavioral finance is an area of increasing interest in financial markets. However it has been difficult for human traders to keep pace due to the sheer volume and detail of data and the need to interpret it and spot trends immediately,” said Philip Brittan, chief technology officer and global head of platform for financial and risk, Thomson Reuters. “With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualization and analytics tools. This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we plan to do to turn qualitative, unstructured text into quantitative and actionable insight for our customers.”

The feed incorporates identified key influencers as well as a broad cross-section of all activity to provide a unique and powerful picture of global Twitter sentiment at any given time. Customers also have the ability to drill down into the underlying data to investigate further what is being said and by whom.