Here's the line:
...You see financial journalists have to take vows of poverty and chastity. If we traded on information we glean as journalists we’d get sacked and probably go to jail.That was Alphaville's Paul Murphy.
But if we did trade, well…. Gold looks good.
I have no idea whether he has any special insight. On the other hand it is well within the realm of possibility that gold trades lower than $1000 in the next twelve months which would be an approximate 50% retracement of the Sept. 2011 $1923.70.
On the other hand he may be pulling Smith's tit and tweakin' him.
For the rest of it, the post "Noah Smith is a moron and he’ll get cancer soon, etc" is worth a read.
The economist in question, Noah Smith is a bit of a douche and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
On ZeroHedge, well, they're ZeroHedge.
On news analytics there are plenty of resources, a good place to start is "The Handbook of News Analytics in Finance" from Wiley.
Thompson Reuters and Dow Jones have been pitching product for a few years now. We haven't had the Pearson (FT) salesman come calling but I imagine they have some offerings.
One of the early software purveyors, Predictive Signals wrote in 2010:
...For example, in a third blog post we looked at whether there was a relationship between company mentions in a specific financial news blog (FT Alphaville) and future market returns. Specifically for discrete days where a company was mentioned in that blog, we calculated a metric based on sentiment and momentum for that company and looked for a relationship between that metric and returns. We found a statistically significant relationship and interestingly enough, did not find a similar relationship across media mentions as a whole....And like the snake swallowing his own tail, we've come full circle.
