Montreal Tech Watch

Coming up after years of experience in information processing and months of development, BullBear provides now real-time analysis of any news related to traded commodities. A trader who bets on energy, or a precious metal such as gold can see the trends, from newswire services, newspapers, and of course specialized information sources.

Any information from the web can be classified in either the bull category, which means positive (displayed in blue), or the bear category, which is a negative rating (displayed in red in the app). Bull can be increased demand from countries or industries, low supply due to natural causes, and bear can be over-supply, or macro causes such as economic crisis.

BullBear.ca has their algorithms running all the time, which means you get a dashboard with the real-time analysis of sources. The user interface is quite simple and straightforwarding, perhaps masking the technology and also the scientific research required to be able to classify a piece of information. You have to be able to decide wether the article relates to any commodity first, if it has key and relevant information to traders, and then decide if it’s bull or bear. Which is not something easy, with all the subtlety that journalists and analysts are using, since they can correlate different pieces of information, mix past and present facts, and then think about future trends as well. Neural networks can well, as well as other known ways to classify information, but you have to start all over again if there’s a new journalist/editor coming in.

BullBear is an interesting play, in a nice market influenced mainly by a few initiated experts; needless to say, traders are welcoming warmly new technologies that gives them relevant, unbiased and real-time information. The service is now currently expanding fast in Asia, mainly India and South-East Asia, and the BullBear team is now considering adding more sources of information as well as offering customized information analysis for subscribers.

BullBear.ca is an application developed by OODA Technologies, a Montreal research & development company focused on document and information analysis for the aerospace, defense and finance industry. OODA received recently a grant from PARI-CNRC to fund development and commercialization of BullBear. If you were aware of what’s going on in the community, BullBear was also around at theBugHunt and also the latest NewTech event, and I hope we’ll see them more, perhaps with the nascent trading & finance startups community in Montreal.

Check out BullBear