The Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, ingests financial news stories from Yahoo Finance along with minute-by-minute stock price data and then uses key words from the news to predict stock movements:
Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes – and it never holds a stock for longer.
The system was developed by Robert P. Schumaker of Iona College in New Rochelle and and Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona, and was first described in a paper published early this year.
Schumaker came up with a list of 211 terms — he calls them verbs for his own arcane reasons — that had some power to move stock prices up or down in the next 20 minutes:
The five verbs with highest negative impact on stock price are hereto, comparable, charge, summit and green. If the verb hereto were to appear in a financial article, AZFinText would discount the price by $0.0029. While this movement may not appear to be much, the continued usage of negative verbs is additive.
The five verbs with the highest positive impact on stock prices are planted, announcing, front, smaller and crude.