Traders' Roundtable

In my never-ending quest for better trading tools, I have come across something that I think has intriguing possibilities.

Specifically it is a Google tool called “Google Insights for Searchâ€

Interesting, and I am sure it has some validity. About two years ago a friend of a friend was asking about this as they had developed software to scroll through news items as well as internet searches and a whole host of other things. They were looking for ideas about how to market/monetize their idea and research as they had done some simple back testing.
I dont know what happened to them, but they were talking about either selling it to a hedge fund, or a broker.....a timely reminder to look up what happened to them....if I find out I will reply here.

DPH,
Seems like you have lost confidence in your ability to trade simple price trends....
anyway these are difficult times for many ::))
Raj

Seems like you have lost confidence in your ability to trade simple price trends....

Raj,

I have not lost confidence at all, trading price trends is what I do (and firmly believe in). I simply have an open mind and a ravenous appetite for new ideas (do you?)….Sometimes new ideas pan out, most often they don’t, but this kind of curiosity leads to occasional “breakthroughsâ€

My biggest concern with my time investment in this is that Google will stop offering the data (for free anyway). They recently did this to webmasters when they decided to remove keyword data from Google Analytics Accounts.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/m ... ssing.html

This was extremely valuable information to website owners because it showed them the frequency and specifics of what words and phrases searchers used to land on the various pages of their website. With this information webmasters could spot trends and more finely tune their search engine optimization to target the key search words and phrases that generated the most traffic and revenue.

Google did this under the guise of protecting user’s privacy, but this is bullshit because they still offer the same data to their PAID ADVERTISERS! (And they did this with a straight face!?)

This is a real shame because it will push power back to the “old guardâ€

DPH wrote:I started to wonder if there might be a correlation between search term popularity and market moves.

Dean, It sounds like you are trying to measure the ‘Mind’(*) of the market, that is what the market is thinking or more correctly what people in the market are thinking
(Note that this is different to what people are feeling(*) about the market (i.e. psychological) and what people are doing(*) in the market (i.e. technical))

(*) These are all terms coined by a Mr Woody Dorsey in his book “Behavioral Tradingâ€

Further to the above, we could probably agree that Slogans like “Greeceâ€

Try searching for "jobs"! Apparently a lot of people started to worry about their jobs in September/October 2011 I think it's an interesting idea, but it's very difficult to backtest and the words to look for will probably change over time. Anyway, thanks for sharing...

I imagine there would have been a huge spike in the search term "Jobs".
Unfortunately this would have been mostly due to the passing of Steve Jobs rather than employment prospects or lack thereof.
(I note the smiley winky face in your post so you probably meant this anyway. )

*edit* - Fixed spelling error

Who's Steve Jobs?!

I was just trying to illustrate that one may draw very different conclusions depending on ones knowledge of the meaning of a specific word/phrase...

. . . . and speaking of passé , . . .

How overrated & overused has the term “Fiscal Cliffâ€