SMA Expands Sentiment Dashboard Beyond Equities

SMA is adding the new markets in direct response to customer demand, says SMA chief executive Joe Gits, adding that the vendor is also exploring expanding into European equities. "We hope to at least carry the FTSE 350 early next year, and we are looking at other European and Asian exchanges as well," he says.

The addition of futures, currencies and ETFs is in response to client requests, Gits says. "The use of social media on currencies and commodities lagged equities. There are growing mentions of these asset classes in social media, and we are now able to generate a signal. Clients that started with our equity feed are now asking for this new data," he adds.

Adding the new asset classes presented new challenges for the provider, Gits says, "The conversations are much more technical trading-focused than what you see in equities. Earnings, product, corporate and technical data drives sentiment on equities, whereas commodities is much more macro and technical. Your scoring dictionary needs to account for these differences."

Currently, SMA's dashboard uses feeds that track all US equities in real-time, scanning conversations and social media mentions before publishing the data on a visual interface for analysis. Users log in to the dashboard and are alerted to stocks that are moving or making gains, and can then drill down in greater detail to conduct more research. The dashboard alerts traders to stocks which receive little publicity elsewhere, bringing them new trading ideas and making them aware of "movements they wouldn't normally have seen or considered," Gits says.

Increasing the body of sources available is a natural progression for the dashboard, Gits says. "We want to get signals from as many sources as we can... [though] Twitter and StockTwits are the two that people are really looking at," he adds.

As well as adding more social media sources, the company will soon introduce topic-level information that will "aggregate information on what tweets are about. So if a thread for a particular security is earnings-related... we're going to track that kind of information," Gits says. "People are interested in what a conversation thread is about. It is primarily overall sentiment, but if there are earnings coming up and people are talking about other things in conjunction with earnings, people want to know that," he says.

Users have also been asking for enhancements to help them drill down more on account-specific information, which will shortly be introduced into the dashboard to allow subscribers to identify the most popular influencers, which can be tailored to a user's selected "universe" to only show tweets from specifically selected, certified accounts. "You pick a stock─Apple, for example─and we can tell you who are the most influential Tweeters on Apple, the most positive and the most negative.... Immediately you know if an influential account is saying something important," Gits says.