Trading Stocks: Fire The Humans

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 30, 4:55AM EDT

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Reuters (RTRSY) is beginning to market a new piece of software tha scans the news. It can tell the difference between the good news and bad news about a public company. The software program will then buy or sell shares based on its analysis of the content.

According to The Wall Street Journal: "Based on a list of 20,000 words and phrases, the new program scores news articles based on how often words such as "excellent" and "disappointing" appear."

The alledged advantage of the new software is that it is fast. It can beat most humans in a race to sift through news and make "buy" or "sell" decisions according to the data.

The price point for the product starts just above $250,000, less than an investment bank would pay an experienced trader. Consider the savings.

As they say in the science fiction movies:"Take me to you leader".

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.