Most talked stocks of India

Tool developed by a Swiss start-up makes consumption of financial news more structured

Tech Mahindra topped the charts with a gain of 947% on Thursday; HCL Technologies was up 521%, according to the BSE portal. Are these numbers real?

They are but with a twist. Though these statistics appear on a dashboard on the BSEindia.com, these are not stock prices. The TechM stock actually gained only 2.4%, while HCL was down marginally at the time of writing.

The numbers quoted earlier represent a measure of market attention for these stocks. A click on these names takes you to a snapshot of events in the past 30 days, interesting graphs and tweets. The market attention is measured by analysing what the 'financial crowd' is talking about, in traditional and social media. For example, these big information technology companies are in the news because of the layoffs across the sector.

Two months ago, BSE tied up with a Swiss financial technology start-up, called Sentifi. Using a cross-platform application, this company aims to simplify the way financial news is accessed.

Envisaged as the largest 'Financial Crowd-Intelligence' platform, Sentifi's Founder & Chief Executive, Anders Bally, wants to turn millions of stakeholders on social media into "financial market satellites".

"With an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technology platform built over the past four years, Sentifi extracts insights of billions of information, while at the same time reducing this information to a summary of a handful of events and pattern of events driving market attention and valuation of stocks," Bally, in India recently, told Business Standard.

"Thanks to the new social media sharing culture, big data technologies and self-learning algorithms, the financial information market is a paradigm shift, providing a better understanding of market attention and financial value drivers than ever before," he added. "We are building the largest crowd-intelligence platform in the world, with the objective to identify, classify and rank the influence of 250 million stakeholders sitting on information which can impact the valuation of listed companies. We monitor and analyse, using big data and AI, what six million stakeholders communicate of relevance to 40,000 listed companies around the world."

Every stakeholder is ranked by their contribution of financially relevant information in the past 12 months, weighted with their validation in the crowd. "This enables us to generate streams of fake news-free information if the users apply strict filters."

Awareness of this tool at the top levels of the investment hierarchy, such as top brokers and fund managers, is still low. However, Sentifi's dashboard has gathered healthy numbers of impressions, running into millions. The tool could be helpful to traders, investors and other stock market professionals to the extent that it allows the user to have a quantitative analysis of the impact of a particular development or event, though this might not have impacted the stock prices immediately. It also helps users to approach financial news consumption in a more structured way.

Sentifi has the partnership with a few other exchanges globally, whose names it is not keen to share. It also has these tools available in India, on some Indian news portals. BSE says it has positive responses from users. "As a part of our continued endeavour to provide relevant information for decision making for investment purposes, we thought it relevant to provide information to investors on discussions taking place on social media on the BSE website. We have received a positive feedback from users of the website on this new feature," a BSE spokesperson said.