The news group has been using computers to write stories about company results
since March. Within 0.3 seconds of a company making its results public, the computers can generate an earnings story.
The computer stories use previous results stored in Thomson’s database to say whether a company has done better or worse than expected.
This is not about cost but about delivering information to our customers at a speed at which they can make an almost immediate trading decision, Matthew Burkley, SVP of strategy at Thomson Financial, told the Financial Times.
Thomson is writing computer programs for different types of stories, at a cost of $150,000 to $200,000 per project, in an effort to catch up with rivals Bloomberg and Reuters.
According to FT, Reuters said it automatically generated some stories, while Bloomberg said it did not.
