We formed Acuity in 2013 with the aim of revolutionising the online trading experience for millions of investors with the introduction of visual news and sentiment tools. This was in stark contrast to the traditional, institutional style of tools that had plagued the retail industry.
We combine the latest in AI research with a dedicated team of academics, scientists, news and market professionals to offer tools that offer an alternative view of the financial markets that bring value to investors of all levels and experience.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Andrew and I were former colleagues. During that time we worked together on the launch of the first elementised news feed. This was groundbreaking technology driven by a latency arms race by the institutional banks and hedge funds, turning textual news content into numerical data that could be used by electronic trading systems.
At that time the costs of such technologies and the skill sets required to derive value from this new data was prohibitive to all but the professional and institutional investors. We knew how valuable this data was and we wanted to make it accessible to investors of all levels and budgets. To do that though, we knew it needed to be delivered in a way that was easier to use and didn’t require the resources to adopt it. Therefore the visual element of our products was key to our success.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Whilst our foundations are in news analytics and news technology, we recognised that news sentiment data was only one data source that provides value to traders. Therefore when we started Acuity we had the vision of bringing all the data sources that traders use together and using AI to analyse the combined data sets to uncover even more insights about the financial markets than could be garnered from single sources.
This led to the acquisition of Signal Centre in 2021, a firm specialising in technical analysis and the expansion of our data science team at our Research and Development hub in Spain.
What can we hope to see from Acuity Trading in the future?
We are constantly investing in research and development to improve and expand our product offering. We have a suite of new tools coming to market this year and we are also working on more integration and marketing automation capabilities that will help clients derive even greater value.
