Opfine: "Real-time" financial, company and market sentiment: Part 1
Jinfo Blog

By Scott Brown

Abstract

Opfine or “Opinionated financial news”, provides two views of financial news sentiment. One is an overall view of sentiment over the past year for commodities markets, companies, countries and the housing market. It also provides access to a selection of recent articles contributing to current sentiment for a selected market, company or country.

Item

Introduction

Opfine (http://www.opfine.com) or “Opinionated financial news”, provides two views of financial news sentiment. One is an overall view of sentiment over the past year for commodities markets, companies, countries and the housing market. It also provides access to a selection of recent articles contributing to current sentiment for a selected market, company or country.

Figure 1: Opfine’s Macro sentiment view

Audience

Opfine would be a useful tool for anyone tracking news and sentiment for companies and markets, including the housing market. Analysts, information and intelligence professionals, and marketing departments might find value in the tool. Those interested in the financial markets may also find the “Macro” views of the markets useful.

Subscription options

At the time of writing, access to Opfine is free. When you sign up, you get access to the “Pro” version, which provides full access to all of Opfine’s currently available features and information.

Formats

Opfine is a web-based product. The dashboards are simple to understand, and users can easily link to recent articles. Although the site has links to export certain sections of the information to XML (RSS feeds), these links are not currently functional. Opfine indicates that these will be available when a paid subscription version is produced. Marian Medla, who currently runs Opfine, says that, with the exception of the Macro views, all other sections are in early beta stage.

Product overview

Opfine serves up financial sentiment information in five areas: a Macro view, which provides an overall view of the markets; companies (over 3000); commodities markets (over 20); countries (over 47); and housing. Opfine gets most of its data from publicly available RSS or ATOM feeds, with its main sources being Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, Google News, Reuters and CNBC. While these are the primary sources, Opfine also draws in information from other major news and online sources (described further below). Opfine then uses these newsfeeds and analyses individual article sentiment “polarity” (negative or positive).

Under the Macro view, you can see “sentiment by hour” on the markets and the articles associated with that sentiment score. Under “Today’s topics”, you can also drill down into articles by keywords associated with the day’s stories.

While the Macro views of any company, commodities market or country provide a chart of up to a year’s worth of sentiment, the articles available for viewing and sentiment examination seem to be limited to the most recent month, at most. For any company, market or country, articles are presented in two categories: “picked strong positive/negative headlines” and “most positive/negative news” over the past month. Both of these views are helpful. The first category provides a view of sentiment in the past few days. The second category provides a view into recent, strongly positive or negative articles. This can help users quickly identify news of interest.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll dig into the details of what Opfine provides, and take a look at its sentiment capabilities.

View Part 2 »

« Blog