Don't want to give too much of Grumby's plot away, but another real world sighting of technology from it's fictional world. This time it's predicting stock market moves based on the mood of Twitter users - a paper from Indiana University and University of Manchester professors. (hat tip to Paul Kedrosky)
We analyze the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, namely OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy)...We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%.
Sounds familiar. From Grumby:
In one marathon coding session – I turned up the oxygen content in the middle of the night – I bang out arBroker. I am careful to not mix the mood code that determines individual risk profiles and the code that goes out and sums aggregate expectations of all our users about products and companies. I had to be really careful about whose mood I was interested in before issuing a ‘buy’ or a ‘sell’. Markets deal in aggregates but at the end of the day, individuals make all the decisions. I saw that on the floor of the stock exchange, at Fidelity’s offices and in my crude understanding about markets. Millions or billions of decisions are summed and calculated to determine the right price at that particular moment in time.
I can’t wait to fire it up, and fortunately, the market opens at 6:30 a.m. on the west coast, so I run out to Starbucks and buy a Venti Mocha Double Latte Extra Hot No Whip and I’m good to go and test this sucker out.
Thanks to Meeta, our database is filled with all sorts of formerly useless trivia, on buying habits of Grumby users, to questions asked at stores to real time reviews of products. It’s not really hard to find this stuff in the haystack of Grumby-collected data and aggregate it to match the mood of an individual.
As I load up arBroker, I take a long sip of my latte and then let out a long exhale of delight.
“You just bought 300 shares of Starbucks Corporation, symbol SBUX at twenty five dollars and forty two cents,” my Grumby informs me.
Whoa. That was fast.
How nice. A time machines that gets stock picks from the future.
Even if this were true, what can anyone hope to do with a decent indicator that predicts movement in a faulty stock index over the next 2 to 6 days?
Does this time machine say how much stocks will move or what the long-term trend is?
Nope. It's useless for anyone investing capital for the long term.
Posted by: H.R. Dobbs | October 22, 2010 at 10:41 PM
And Google's curating fashions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/fashion/18googlefashion.html
(Just finished the book - way fun!)
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Nope. It's useless for anyone investing capital for the long term.
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