DCM Capital, provider of algorithmic sentiment analysis technology, put itself up for auction on its website today, with the tag line 'We're for sale'.
The DCM Capital website reads:
"At DCM Capital we do things differently. Twelve months ago we put a team together to build the world's first social media, investor sentiment analysis trading platform. With a budget of £350k and a team of 6 talented developers we achieved our goal, on time and on budget. Now we move onto our next project, to successfully use social media to publicly auction our company andinnovative technology to the highest bidder. We believe this is another world first!"
The firm is, as expected, pushing the news of the auction heavily on social media sites, like Twitter.
A prospectus currently lists the guide price for the firm at £5 million, with a starting bid of £1. At the time of writing, the highest bid on the website was £2,000.
The auction runs from today and ends 10am GMT Monday 18th February 2013.
Bloomberg news reported that the winner of the auction will get the entire issued share capital of DCM Capital, its assets, intellectual property, technology, trademarks, branding, domain names, licenses and software, the company said in the prospectus.
DCM Capital, which was behind a now-defunct Twitter sentiment-based hedge fund, tapped the technology for a new online trading platform.
The DCM Dealer platform gives traders access to the firm's algorithmic sentiment analysis technology to help them make investment decisions.
The algorithm was developed by academics who caused a stir in 2010 when they published research showing that analysing the content of daily Twitter feeds using two mood tracking tools enabled them to predict with an 87.6% accuracy the daily ups and downs in the closing value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.