FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What is Contix?

    Contix is a tool used by traders to identify early and differentiated financial news on social media. Mentions of breaking news events on both social and traditional media are clustered together and presented in real-time within a rich data context.

  • How is Contix better than my existing news providers?

    Contix scans social media and traditional media for breaking news events. Important financial news events break first on social media on a daily basis so if you do not pay attention to social media, you will be late to important events that move asset prices. We provide numerous examples of major financial news events broke on social media ahead of traditional media.

  • Why is Contix better than other social media analytics vendors?

    We are exclusively focused on event detection for traders and investors. While most systems use basic keyword searches and manually constructed lists of authors, Contix employs a comprehensive finance-specific algorithmic approach that identifies breaking news events from the entire universe of social media sources taking into account the many different ways that people can refer to companies or topics. Our system is social media native, meaning it was designed to handle the type of informal language you find in the social sphere and the enormous volume of posts.

    We also incorporate over 500 traditional media sources into our product which provides for a complete breaking news product and enables our users to know when an event sourced from social media is ahead of traditional media.

    Finally, our modern web, desktop and mobile applications are tuned for traders, making Contix easy to use and customize.

  • What sources does Contix use for its alerts?

    We scan the entire Twitter firehose (over 500MM tweets per day) as well as hundreds of other social and traditional media sources. As new relevant sources become available, they are added to our system.

  • How do you find valuable alerts?

    We use multiple deep algorithmic approaches. Contix’s event detection engine was built from the ground up specifically to find alerts relevant to traders and investors from social media. This gives us a distinct advantage over general purpose offerings that don’t understand the nature and language of finance and the most important and credible sources of breaking financial news information. As a result we are able to consistently identify breaking news events faster and more reliably than other vendors.

  • Are your alerts reliable?

    Reputation management and alert policing tools are at the core of our system. There is a constant battle between those analyzing social media for useful news and those trying to manipulate the market. We have a broad arsenal of tools that enable us to consistently identify bad actors and data.

  • Does Contix do a good job filtering out noise?

    Yes. Simple keyword searches are very noisy. Even manually curated lists of reliable sources can produce a lot of irrelevant content. Contix only sends alerts that present relevant breaking financial news events. We do this by applying semantic analysis that incorporates the unique and specialized language of finance in a way general purpose platforms do not.

  • How are alerts delivered?

    We provide numerous options including our web application, desktop alerts, mobile alerts, email and API. Our modern HTML5 web application’s user experience has been finely tuned by designers who specialize in the finance space.

  • How does Contix get my attention on a busy desktop when an important alert surfaces?

    We use color. New alerts color pulse as they come in. A simple green bar freshness indicator, which fades over time, appears to the left of the alert. If, during a quick visual scan you see a lot of green at the top of an alert column, it’s likely worth investigating.