our News

September 26, 2009

Semlab in RTS Webinar “How to Capitalize on Event Based Trading”

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On Wednesday the 23rd of September 2009, experts from SemLab, Need To Know News, RavenPack and RTS had a lively discussion in the webinar: “How to Capitalize on Event Based Trading”.

During the webinar it was discussed what event based trading really is, how traders are able to capitalize on expected and unexpected events, how technology plays a role in event based trading and how the different types of event-based strategies are deployed across all asset classes worldwide.

You can view the webinar here.

 

September 24, 2009

Semlab to enhance Market Risk assessment metrics

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Semlab, together with an international consortium of financial experts and supported by several large financial institutions, has submitted a proposal to the EU to enhance market risk assessment calculations by incorporating real time semantically analysed news-based market information.

The aim is to improve market risk metrics, such as the Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). The incorporation of financial news will compensate for inflexibility of existing models with regard to strong market fluctuations or market instability and give more dynamic and more reliable market risk estimation.

The consortium consists of several top level financial experts and software companies as well as cutting edge research institutes.

 

June 11, 2009

SemLab’s Semantic Search

The SemLab semantic search platform is based on our Vicore™ data processing platform which, among others, is the basis of our leading semantic news analysis solution ViewerPro™.

The purpose of semantic search is to improve standard keyword-based search technologies by adding domain dependent, a-priory knowledge about the semantics of the concepts entailed in the documents that are analysed. This a-priory knowledge is contained in ontologies: formal descriptions of the concepts that exist in the domain of application. In general the ontologies play a pivotal role in a semantic enabled technology and have a profound effect on its overall quality. For a search platform, the common quality parameters Precision and Recall will largely depend on the quality of the ontologies used.

Semlab’s semantic platform fully acknowledges that ontologies are the key to a successful semantic analysis system and therefore support ontology maintenance as a core technology. This includes both expert knowledge expression as well as (supervised) automatic ontology learning from domain-specific documents. In addition the SemLab platform fully supports existing base ontologies and offers their own default domain ontologies for many areas of financial information management, exactly as are used every day by the ViewerPro semantic news analysis platform.

The SemLab semantic platform is in essence a data pipelining platform in the sense that the data sources are fed to the start of the line, various relatively independent subsequent operations are done on the data. The results of these are stored in various databases.

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In the case of semantic search, the data sources consist of text documents (e.g. reports, news messages, e-mails) in various formats and the final result is an semantic index, modeling the occurrence of ontology terms in the documents. When a user presents the platform with search query, this query is treated as if it were another document and also expressed in terms of the ontology. Since both the document corpus and the user’s query are expressed within the same domain of discourse, they can be compared and ranked on similarity. Finally, using carefully designed threshold values, the resulting document sections are presented to the user in a GUI or available through an API to other applications. In addition to the retrieval of documents, the domain ontology can also be queried directly. In this way the semantic search platform also serves as a question answering tool, enabling users to quickly retrieve the corporate domain knowledge.

 

May 25, 2009

Equity markets and The News – Part I

Traditional economic theory has a well defined position regarding the possible effectiveness of news to determine the future behaviour of equity markets.

One of the basic assumptions, that equity prices essentially perform a random walk around the prevailing trend, would appear to foreclose any likelihood of outperforming the market for any significant period of time. It is claimed that the sheer number and interconnectedness of the variables determining the outcome leads to an intricate interdependent system that can only effectively be modelled using the mathematical concept of a non-linear dynamic system. The essence of a non-linear dynamic system is that minute – practically undetectable – changes in entry conditions may well lead to very significant differences in the outcome. Thus, effectively preventing any meaningful predictions about the future outcome, even if all entry conditions were known.

This leads to a situation of uncertainty which is graphically illustrated by prof. John Allen Paulos (1). He state that all equity market assessments essentially state that “Things will continue roughly as they have been” with the added clause “Until something changes”.

 

May 25, 2009

Equity markets and The News – Part II

The relationship between news articles and the behaviour of the stock market has received steady interest by the scientific research community over the last 40 years. With the emergence of effective text analysis technology, and recently with the onset of semantic processing, efforts to capture this relationship have been intensified with (among many others) the following interesting results.

 

May 11, 2009

Advanced Trading News publishes article about ViewerPro

Semlab’s Project Manager Thomas Dohmen was interviewed for a news article last week by Cristina McEachern of the influential Advanced Trading News website.
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The article focusses on the latest ViewerPro release, which has a number of important improvements, such as the user interface, duplicate event detection, alerts, advanced semantic statistics, financial terms ontology updates, Reuters NewsScope and Dow Jones integration, improved web scrapers and connection to stock ticker data.

The news has been well received by trader organisations worldwide.

The full article can be read at: Advanced Trading

 

April 28, 2009

ViewerPro live demo’s successfully received at TradeTech 2009

At the TradeTech 2009 in Paris, Viewerpro was demonstrated live to leading news providers and buy- and sell side firms from the Equity Trading & Technology industry. The live demonstrations were well received and showed the added value of ViewerPro’s news analysis capabilities.
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The ViewerPro platform enables buy side users to be alerted about relevant news impacts, generated from disparate feeds from the electronic distribution platforms.

For algorithmic traders there is the possibility to incorporate ViewerPro’s automatic news impact assessment into trading strategies.

 

April 22, 2009

ViewerPro Core

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ViewerPro Core provides a software solution that takes you straight to the ‘core’ of ViewerPro’s news interpretation technology. Viewerpro Core enables you to benefit from ViewerPro’s semantic analysis technology without having to be involved with the modelling of business logic or administrator tasks.

The new Core-version of the ViewerPro program offers an elegantly simplified viewer for keeping up to date with financial news impacts on the selected equity-portfolios of your preference, without any of the more advanced modeling tools. This makes ViewerPro Core easy to use and ideal for your customers that are in need of reliable and real-time news impact evaluation.

 

April 9, 2009

ViewerPro Custom Projects

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ViewerPro is a highly flexible and adaptable platform and can be adjusted to accommodate most news impact analysis scenarios. Any specific client desires are analysed by our experts and implemented in a bilateral project in which our customer communicates directly to the ViewerPro development team. This ensures a clear understanding of our customers’ wishes and a fast realization of the required functionality.

Examples of recent projects are the deployment of clients proprietary knowledge repositories for further enhancement of the news analysis and front end user interface integration into an existing trading environment.

 

March 26, 2009

ViewerPro for early health risk warning

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SemLab is currently proposing a joint research effort, backed by the European Community to deploy their leading event extraction platform ViewerPro in the health risk domain.

SemLab will be leading a consortium of top level technology companies and academia to realise the next level in media monitoring. This project will include speech-to-text functionality, full support for multilinguality, self-learning event extraction and simulation-based event risk assessment.