Thomson Reuters, MarketPsych Unveil Sentiment Index Update, Adding Bitcoin Data

To create the feed, the vendors scan and score more than 400 new news and social media sites in real time.

MarketPsych launched its own suite of cryptocurrency sentiment indexes at the start of this year, providing 43 sentiment scores across 100 digital currencies.

“We have developed analytics to look at how people are discussing these currencies in the online communities and chatrooms that cover them. We monitor all types of references, from vulnerabilities in code to hack attacks… for people who can’t monitor the hundreds of chat rooms that are talking about them,” said MarketPsych CEO Richard Peterson at the time about the process of creating crypto indexes, which was a whole new challenge compared to MarketPsych’s existing coverage of traditional financial markets and their taxonomies. “Sentiment for cryptocurrencies is different. Obviously there are negative words, like ‘bad,’ but there are also more sophisticated terms, like ‘vulnerable’ code or ‘compromised’ code or ‘wallet,’ or phrases like ‘can’t be used as payment’ or ‘slow transaction speeds.’ And the majority of cryptocurrency users are not native English speakers, so—even though these groups have their own terminologies—the language can be somewhat distorted,” he says, adding that recognizing the most useful terms to follow is “an iterative process.”

In addition to the Bitcoin indexes, version 3.0 of the Thomson Reuters-MarketPsych Indices also includes expanded sentiment coverage of fixed income securities and stock indexes, and broader coverage of currencies, countries and commodities.