How a digital company is benefiting from Trump’s negative tweets

World Today

Donald Trump has come to rely on Twitter to voice his opinions in unprecedented ways for a head of state. His Tweets have targeted companies like Boeing, Delta Airlines, and Toyota, spurring investors to dump shares. An advertising company recently created a trading algorithm that is profiting off Trump’s negative tweets and donating the money to an animal shelter.

In the three months since Donald Trump won the U.S. election, he’s tweeted about publicly traded companies – and many of his tweets have moved markets.

On December 6th, he encouraged the U.S. government to cancel an order from Boeing. Later that month, he targeted Lockheed Martin.

In January, he threatened Toyota in a tweet, saying it would face a big border tax if it continued with its plans to build a plant in Mexico.

All of these tweets caused the share prices of those companies to drop.

Dan Mills, director of New Client Partnerships at advertising firm T3, thought it was interesting that a tweet could have such an impact.

“It’s not really based on any actual market or value fundamentals. It’s more so just driven by the emotion of what’s happening was interesting and something to explore,” said Mills. “And that was really the spark that then kind of threw out the idea can we build an algorithm or a bot that can activate against this type of behavior ”

Within days the firm had created an algorithm that monitors Trump’s Twitter account for comments about publicly traded companies. When it sees a Tweet it deems to be negative in sentiment, it instantly shorts that company’s stock.

All profits are donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) the first humane society established in North America.

The success of the Trump and Dump bot depends on markets reacting to Trump tweets and those days may be coming to an end. Trump recently tweeted negatively about department store Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, but the stock barely reacted.


For more on the Trump bump and the President’s impact on the stock market, CGTN talked to Mark Hamrick, Bankrate’s senior economic analyst and Washington bureau chief.