UPDATED 20:39 EDT / FEBRUARY 10 2017

Meet the creator of Trump and Dump, a bot that shorts Trump’s corporate targets

Companies are often losing millions or billions of dollars in market value when President Trump slams them in a tweet. Now, one company has found a way to make a profit on Trump-related stock swoons — and maybe save a few puppies.

Actually, this clever stock trader is a bot. Created by the ad agency T3, the Trump and Dump automated trading program plucks out publicly traded companies named in Trump’s tweets and analyzes their sentiment using machine learning. If the tweet is determined through sentiment analysis to be negative, the bot shorts the stock in milliseconds, before the market can react, and sends an alert via Slack to T3. When the stock tanks, T3 closes the short and makes a profit — which it donates to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

spoke with the inventor of the Trump and Dump bot on the Silicon Valley Friday Show, a weekly video show and podcast that interviews top executives, venture capitalists and others and provides commentary on the week’s events.

T3 President Ben Gaddis said the company “kicked that idea around over Slack and in about 30 minutes we had an idea for the platform. And about two days later one of our engineers had actually built it.”

It may sound strange for an ad agency to create this, but it’s actually related to what the company does. “This is what we do for a living,” Gaddis told me. “We help big brands monitor all their digital presence and build strategies.”

T3 found some interesting trends. “When he tweets positively, we don’t see that much of a bump,” Gaddis said. “When he tweets negatively, typically the stock drops anywhere between 1 and 4 percent, sometimes even greater than that, but it rebounds very quickly.”

So a big goal of the bot and the algorithm is understanding how long to hold the shares, which is a proxy for the time it takes for people to “come back to a rational state and start to buy back a stock that’s valuable.”

Gaddis isn’t saying how much T3 has made or contributed from the bot, though he recently wrote a check to the ASPCA.

The bot also points up a larger shift, he said: “We’ve never really seen things like policy, whether it’s monetary policy or general policy, be distributed through one platform like Twitter and have such a big impact. We think it’s a societal shift that is sort of the new norm.”

Here’s the full show, which also includes interviews looking ahead to Mobile World Congress later this month with Dan Rosenbaum, president and editor in chief of Center Ring Media, and Lynn A Comp, a senior director in Intel Corp.’s Network Platforms Group:


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