Nous unveils crowd-sourced data feeds

Nous is launching four different Spark Feed data feeds aimed at banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions. The data feeds range from a historical raw data only feed, to feeds which provide access to Nous's real time forex and stock indices data, and also a slice of all its historical predictions.

The purpose of Spark Feed is to help financial institutions understand - and even predict - market price changes at multiple time scales, including much shorter ones than are served by traditional analysts.

The data driving Spark Feed is harvested from Nous' proprietary system for collecting real time opinion, called Spark Profit, which itself was released at the end of January 2014 after extensive field testing.

Unlike other crowd sourced financial data providers, the data from Spark Profit doesn't rely on interpreting natural language responses but instead is measuring actual trading decisions. It is therefore more predictive than crowd-sourced feeds that mine natural language data on social media platforms.

Spark Profit, an app available for phones and desktops, already has 20,000 virtual traders. It is increasing by around 3,000 new users a month at the moment, although this will accelerate. The app's main attractions are that it is free-to-use and provides regular income for skilled traders. Many of the most consistent performers live in India, the Philippines, Pakistan and Indonesia, and had little to no previous trading experience.

Justin Short, CEO of Nous, says: "We designed Spark Profit to be so simple and intuitive that the whole world can use it. Our best users quickly worked out how to maximize their personal returns and invented their own trading strategies to achieve that. Their collective decisions are the source of valuable data for Spark Feed, which we are delighted to be launching today to an expert audience of banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions at FinovateEurope." bsp;