> RavenPack:
How News Analytics Has Helped Investors Navigate the Coronavirus Crisis RavenPack’s news sentiment and analytics platform provides financial professionals with insights and actionable statistics derived from the news - how well has it been operating during the coronavirus crisis?
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ver 2.4 million people globally have contracted the Covid-19 virus to date. Of those 165,000 have died, and 628,000 have recovered. Cases have been recorded in just about every country in the world bar the islands of the Pacific, and a handful of African and Asian states. The whole world is in lockdown, and as a result trade has almost ground to halt. This may lead to one of the deepest recessions in recent history. What can RavenPack news analytics say about the Covid-19 pandemic, and more importantly, how can it help investors navigate the crisis? Our data is mainly used by investors to gain an edge in financial markets. This is achieved by either gaining an information advantage or preempting market moves. In the Covid-19 crisis, the data - which is no respecter of lives - has done its job as well as it has always done. We know this because research shows investment strategies that rely on our data operate just as well during crises as the rest of the time; and also because of our own unique insights and experiences during this crisis in particular. Right at the start, for example, on the last day of 2019, our news analytics registered the first forewarning of the crisis to come, when news sentiment for "pneumonia" fell below a key level it had not breached for over a year. A day later the platform ingested its first piece of news referring to what would become the novel coronavirus, a story about a “SARS-related virus outbreak”, in the Taipei News. During January, the Covid-19 story started to gain traction and the headline count for stories about an “epidemic” rose sharply providing a forewarning of the surge in actual cases to come. From a financial market perspective the data was also effective: although the S&P 500 didn’t really react to the virus until February 21 our data was raising warning flags well before then. 178
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