In periods of high market volatility, the reliability and timing of information is even more critical for making good investment decisions. The combination of novelty and double sourced information in FT scoops, makes the information instantly tradable.
On April 23rd 2020, FT Journalists Donato Paolo Mancini and Hannah Kuchler published an article on FT.com on the company Gilead Sciences, which outlined that a hopeful antiviral drug Remdesivir, had “flopped in its first randomised clinical trial, disappointing scientists and investors who had high hopes” for its aid with coronavirus victims. This information was a Scoop for the Financial Times, having first seen draft documents being leaked by the World Health Organization.
Analysis
The article was published on FT.com at 17:41 BST, and the impact is clear. Within an hour, Gilead Sciences’ share price had dropped by 8% relative to the S&P 500 Index, and by 21:00 BST, the impact had left it 5.1% down.
Whilst this outlines the immediacy of the scoop’s impact on Gilead Sciences, it doesn’t give us a clear indication of just how fast things dropped. For that, we must explore minute-by-minute.
The Gilead Sciences article was posted at 17:41. From the first minute, there begins a gradual decline in returns, before a significant drop off after the first five. At its lowest in the first 20 minutes post-publication, Gilead Sciences’ share price had dropped 7.9% relative to the S&P 500 Index.
By acting fast upon publication, market makers providing liquidity were able to change their price in anticipation of the ensuing demand and those in a selling position were able to act and make more money.
How can I be notified of these scoops?
All FT articles are available to Premium subscribers of the Financial Times, however as we can see from above analysis, it can take the market minutes to work out the novel aspect of the information.
We have increased our investment in the generation and digital tagging of scoops, but specifically in those around corporate actions, which are likely to directly affect equities and bond prices. The value of these FT scoops can now be fully leveraged in close to real time thanks to our NotificationsPush API service, which is made accessible via a datamining licence from FT Integrated Solutions.
A scoop tag to identify the novelty and FIGI codes (ticker) help to significantly reduce the time it takes to optimise your position relative to the breaking news. This FT content and additional metadata is not available via any other news API feeds.
For more information about how you can leverage Financial Times journalism for faster investment decision making, please get in touch with our FT Integrated Solutions team.
