Data Partners

The MediaStats indicator suite offers a differentiated perspective on sentiment and other key attributes of media coverage spanning companies, countries, currencies and themes. As markets react rapidly to news, effective models that incorporate news data provide timely insights into fast-moving macroeconomic trends and asset prices. Our research suggests that the amount of information investors receive about an asset, as well as the tone and dispersion of that information, impact their behavior and asset prices.

The media indicators use advanced technologies to gather, score, and process vast quantities of news every day. However, not all news sources are equally created—or exert the same influence on asset prices. The measures correct for a variety of consistent biases discovered through years of academic research and cover a wide range of topics from thousands of individual companies and industries to central banks and social media narratives.

With the rising influence of political and geopolitical risk on market dynamics and economic trends, a systematic approach to measuring and monitoring political risk can help investors improve risk-adjusted performance. To better capture trends in political risk, State Street has partnered with GeoQuant, a Fitch Solutions company, to offer political risk indices tailored to the foreign exchange markets.

GeoQuant produces high-frequency quantitative measures of country-level political risk that quantify over 40 political risks across 127 countries. GeoQuant systematically fuses structural industry data with media, quantifying country-level political risk on a real-time basis using natural language processing, machine learning algorithms and a team of PhD-trained political economists. We examine GeoQuant's set of indicators and how political risk indices may be implemented in cross-sectional currency strategies.