Commentary

Agency's 'Trump and Dump' Bot Analyzes Trump's Tweets, Shorts Stocks, Donates Gains to ASPCA

Trump. Twitter. Trump and Twitter. The two go hand in hand like a baby and his bottle. One without the other is not a pretty sight. Actually, check that, it's a horror show no matter what. But why not turn that horror show into a positive cause. Well, that's exactly what Austin-based T3 did.

The agency has developed a bot that it has lovingly entitled Trump and Dump. As you now, Trump routinely tweets about publicly traded companies and the aftermath is, shall we say, not pretty. As the agency's explanatory video tells us, Trump tweets, stock tanks. The bot's goal is to -- immediately after a Trump tweet -- get out in front of a stock tanking and short the stock, selling high then buying it back low and ultimately realizing a net gain.

The idea for Trump and Dump emerged in an agency Slack conversation. It was noted that stocks fell immediately after a negative tweet from then President-elect Trump. “It kind of took on a life of its own from there. By the end of the day we’d outlined the basic concept and set to work on building an automated trading platform,” said T3’s Chief Technology Officer, Nelan Schwartz. “A day later, we had a working bot making use of Twitter’s Firehose API, Indico for sentiment analysis, Clearbit to pull in relevant company information -- including the stock ticker, Google Finance for current and historical stock performance, and E-Trade to execute the actual trade.”

The bot immediately analyzes the sentiment within the tweet in a span of milliseconds. If negative, the bot will short the stock immediately before it tanks, send an alert of the action via Slack, and then donate the profits to the ASPCA.

Is that not brilliant or what? You can dig into the details of how the thing works here.

On the development of the Trump and Dump bot, T3 President Ben Gaddis said, “We’ve been using artificial intelligence to build bots, monitor social media experiences and engineer engaging applications. This project seemed like a natural progression -- and who doesn’t love puppies?”

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