MSN MoneyCentral – Market gossip is to take on a more high-tech form thanks to a new automated system that will trawl through more than 40m internet sources – from blogs to regulatory filings – onbehalf of hedge funds.
Due for an official launch early next year, the platform is being run by a former Deutsche Bank executive and has received financing from, among others, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venture capital firm that backed Skype before it was sold to Ebay for $4.1bn last year. Ten hedge funds are trying out the system.
Called Monitor110, the platform acts as an aggregator and a filter for hedge funds trying to keep up with the explosion of information sources on the internet, such as blogs. The blog search engine Technorati currently tracks 50m blogs, with about 175,000 new ones created every day.
Scott Lessing, chief operating officer for investment research at Citigroup, suggested that the service could help analysts who currently track blogs “only to the extent that it provides an idea which the analyst can independently verify”.
