In recent years, trading firms have increasingly turned to news and social media sentiment analysis to gauge and predict the impact of breaking news on market prices and volatility.

More than half of quantitative firms now tap machine readable news feeds, according to Aite Group.

Danielle Tierney, Aite Group, says: "The ability to incorporate social media into the analytics toolkit is becoming an increasingly frequent demand from today's generation of traders. Such functionality is no longer just a value-add, but is well on its way to becoming an important part of many quantitative strategies."

However, Thomson Reuters argues that the data from these feeds is simply too detailed to be easily digested by mere flesh and blood traders. The news and data giant is promising to fix this with a new Eikon feature that takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weights and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology.

A charting application gives users a picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company as well as advanced technical analysis which enables them to potentially spot market and company-impacting events as they happen. The feed incorporates identified "key influencers" as well as a broad cross-section of all activity. Customers also have the ability to drill down into the underlying data to investigate further what is being said and by whom.

Eikon users also now get news sentiment analysis based on Thomson Reuters News Analytics. A proprietary scoring system provides a rolling average score for sentiment across over 30,000 listed companies.

Philip Brittan, CTO and global head of platform, financial and risk, Thomson Reuters, says: "With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualization and analytics tools. This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we plan to do to turn qualitative, unstructured text into quantitative and actionable insight for our customers."