An article in the New York Times Business section caught my attention yesterday, "In Volatile Times, Investors Tune in All and Any Predictions".
"[A]mid a financial crisis where the unthinkable has seemingly become routine, Wall Street forecasters — and even the markets themselves — are struggling to get a handle on what will happen next. The result has been a flood of brash pronouncements, as the Cassandras of the financial set try to outdo themselves with increasingly outlandish predictions."
These brash analysts and their outlandish predictions are quoted and heavily discussed in the financial press and blogs. How do you sort through the flood of often conflicting information? In my RSS reader, I've limited myself (!) to 17 financial and 10 business oriented news/blog sources. This makes for about two hundred articles to read every day (and that's excluding all of the other topics I'm interested in). Of course I can't read and think about all of these articles.
This is one of the problems we're trying to solve at MarketOutsider.com. We aren't building yet another predictive system, but rather a system to help sort through all of the financial information. We're starting out simple. Our software, now in alpha, reads articles, identifies companies and summarizes sentiment. We'll be adding more analysis, as we have time, and as we find it useful in our own research.