Google guy builds bot that earns money from Trump tweets
President Donald Trump spends a lot of time on Twitter, and he often tweets about publicly traded companies. These tweets often cause the stock prices of these companies to rise and fall sharply — for example, when Trump tweeted negatively about Lockheed Martin, the company's stock price plummeted.
Now, Max Braun, the head of software for Google X's Robotics division, decided to put Trump's itchy Twitter finger to good use: He built a fully automated bot that analyzes Trump's tweets and buys or shorts a company stock depending on whether Trump praised or disparaged it.
Amazingly, this actually works. Trump tweets about companies a lot, and the market appears to be quite predictable when he does. As you can see in Braun's table below (which is a simulation, not an actual list of trades), the bot is earning money more often than not.
"You’ll see that it sometimes misses a company or gets a sentiment wrong, but it also gets it right a lot. The trading strategy sometimes leaves you up and sometimes down," Braun wrote in a blog post Monday, warning that anyone who decides to use this for profit could also end up losing money (which is why some professionals are wary of using similar tactics).
Interestingly, Braun's not the first to build an automated trading system based on Trump tweets; advertising agency T3 has a similar project, though their bot only shorts stocks.
Just like T3, Braun says he's donating any profits he makes off this project to charity; in his case, it's the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Resources Defense Council and Planned Parenthood.
Amazingly, Braun claims he coded the first working version of the bot on a single plane ride. He invites developers to improve on his code, which is available on GitHub.
If you just wanna check how Braun's bot is doing, you can follow its trading recommendations on Twitter.
via The Next Web
Topics X/Twitter Donald Trump
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
