Even BlackRock’s quant arm, San Francisco-based Systematic Active Equities, uses its machines to read almost 1m online posts a day in China, which it says can offer valuable indicators on what the herd of retail investors are planning to do.
Even China’s tech giants are getting involved. In December, search company Baidu partnered with E Fund Management, an asset manager, to create E Fund Yibai Intelligent Quantitative Strategy fund, which uses searches, news articles, social media and “Baidu’s data-processing ability” to trade.
https://www.ft.com/content/4f66968a-91bc-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546