Bloomberg terminals now show Trump tweets: Business preps for Trump

The new feature at Bloomberg is another example of how the business world is approaching the Trump presidency and its relationship with social media. 

|
Brendan McDermid/Reuters/File
A Bloomberg terminal displays news while traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in May 2013. Bloomberg launched a new feature that tracks President Trump's tweets.

President Donald Trump said at an inauguration ball Friday that he thinks he'll continue tweeting "as a way of bypassing dishonest media."

Wall Street is ready. 

Bloomberg terminals recently launched a partnership with Twitter, enabling traders to track and trade off Mr. Trump's tweets.

The new feature of the financial reporting system is just another example of how the business world is grappling with the new reality of the Trump presidency – an unpredictability in his pronouncements together with the power of his 140 character missives – which is forcing some companies to rethink their relationship with social media.

"He is publicly shaming people and companies," Peter Tchir, a managing director at Brean Capital, told BuzzFeed News. "He is trying to sway companies in a very public manner.”

The financial company published a how-to guide in December for its 300,000 subscribers, detailing how to monitor Trump’s tweets in real time on the software system.

Its users can now customize alerts for Trump’s tweets, filtering out SNL complaints and praise-retweets while tracking his statements on certain companies. The guide also outlines how his comments translate into public sentiments, which are critical to some trading strategies. 

“The trading opportunity in a president who tweets isn’t so much in the immediate tweet as much as the fact that he’s starting a conversation about an issue,” Jamie Wise, founder of Buzz Indexes, a tool that identifies investment opportunities based on quantitative analysis of comments made across social media, told the Wall Street Journal last week.

The terminals, which cost about $25,000 a year, started working with Twitter about three years ago. But it highlights a shift in thought in the Trump era, as many financial institutions traditionally prohibit using social media at work. 

“You don’t want your traders who you’re paying a ton of money to be on Twitter all day,” Bruce Klaw, an assistant professor at the University of Denver, told the Wall Street Journal.

But Trump's brief messages have an outsized influence, as traders have learned to their dismay.

One month after he won the election, Trump lashed out attacks on Lockheed Martin, the maker of the F-35 fighter, that sent the company’s stock to nosedive from the opening bell, losing $4 billion in share value at one point and ending up with more than $6 below the previous close. 

As The Christian Science Monitor's Laurent Belsie noted in December:

Lockheed Martin’s share price nosedived from the opening bell, losing at one point $4 billion in share value – or $28.6 million per character of the Trump tweet. By the close of trading, the share price had rebounded somewhat but was still more than $6 below the previous close. 

“This is a new type of risk, call it presidential tweet risk,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank, told Politico hours after Trump’s F-35 tweet. 

For now, some public relations experts are calling for new media strategies.

“We're in a new era of communications,” John Murray, partner at Monument Policy Group, a lobbying and PR firm, told the Hill Thursday. “A tweet came out, our stock price is changing, reporters are calling.... You don't have the luxury of debating about it.”

“I can’t think of a more important media strategy than this one today,” David Marin, managing principal of Podesta Group, told the Hill. “His bully pulpit is Twitter. You ignore that at your peril.” 

Others say traders need to stop overreacting. “I equate it to seeing a scary movie for the first time,” Steve Quirk, executive vice president of TD Ameritrade, told the Monitor. “It scares you. But the 17th time you see it, it's not scary anymore.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Bloomberg terminals now show Trump tweets: Business preps for Trump
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2017/0121/Bloomberg-terminals-now-show-Trump-tweets-Business-preps-for-Trump
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe