Dow Jones launched its Elementized News Feed earlier this year in an attempt to cash in on the rising popularity of algorithmic trading.

The ultra-low-latency service delivers economic and corporate news in precise and discrete elements in XML-tagged fields. This eliminates the need to parse unstructured text, allowing trading models and computer programs to process, interpret and take action on breaking news in milliseconds.

Coverage includes earnings, merger announcements and analyst upgrades and downgrades across all US and Canadian public companies and major UK companies. The feed also provides sentiment tagging, alerting traders and analysts of significant and unexpected company news about executive changes, bankruptcies, stock splits and restatements.

Dow Jones says the service has now been extended to add "first-of-its-kind public company data in a computer-readable format".

Joe Lanza, VP and MD, solutions for algorithmic and quantitative trading, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, says: "With the addition of corporate news to the Dow Jones Elementized News Feed, we provide the sophisticated information that algorithmic professionals require at the speed they need to stay ahead in today's fast-moving marketplace."

Earlier this year Reuters launched a machine-readable service that scans company news articles, scores how positive or negative they are and then, based on the information, triggers orders in algorithmic trading applications.

The Reuters service, which is based on linguistics technology developed by Corpora, scans and analyses news across thousands of companies and is part of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) platform.