March 22 2016, 16.49 PM IST || Pocket News Alert
In association with Unicom, London
Chandigarh, 22nd March 2016: IIM Calcutta, in association with Unicom, London, recently organized a two-day conference on ‘Sentiment Analysis in Finance: Intelligence and Insights into Trading and Markets’ on 10-11 March 2016 at Raffles City Convention Centre, Singapore. This is the first time IIM Calcutta has organized a conference in international grounds. About 70 participants- bankers, hedge fund managers, traders and academics, attended the conference.
The conference focused on the application of Sentiment Analysis to the respective models of trading, fund management and risk control. The conference saw speakers including academics from IIM Calcutta, Warwick Business School, UK, University of Milano-Bicoca, VrijeUniversiteit, Amsterdam and practitioners from Thomson Reuters, OptiRisk Systems, and Northfield Information Services.
Professor Ashok Banerjee, Faculty-in-charge, The Financial Research and Trading Laboratory, IIM Calcutta shared, “Sentiment analysis is a new field of research and has wider applications in finance including modeling volatility, liquidity and as a measure of risk control. This branch of research is widely gaining popularity among the participants of financial markets, viz, hedge funds, dealers, market makers, investment banks and regulators. Sentiment analysis is also used in the field of consumer behavior”.
Researchers at the Financial Research and Trading Laboratory (Finance Lab) of IIM Calcutta have been working on sentiment analysis for the past two years and have developed a few models to capture investors’ attention and market sentiment. The Finance Lab of IIM Calcutta is presently developing default prediction model using content analysis. This is a new field of research and the Finance Lab of IIM Calcutta is taking lead in this new frontier of research. Sentiment analysis has applications beyond the field of finance to cover areas such as consumer behavior, consumer brands.
Sentiment analysis is gaining popularity worldwide. America’s Federal Reserve is hiring professionals in sentiment analysis to carry out research and understand the financial implications of sentiment analysis. Several fintech companies, including a few in India and Singapore, have developed proprietary algorithm to provide sentiment scores to news. Sentiment analysis is an emerging area where structured and unstructured data is analysed to generate useful insights leading to improved performance. Through text mining of news, micro blogs, and online search results (Google, Wikipedia), massive amounts of data are distilled into information.
In view of the enthusiasm of the participants, a similar conference will be held next year too in Singapore.
