Bloomberg Market Specialist Adela Quinones contributed to this article. The original version appeared first on the Bloomberg Terminal.
Background
Having trouble keeping up with the news? On the Bloomberg terminal alone, more than 1.5 million news and research headlines from about 170,000 sources are published every day — about 17 stories a second.
The pace of market-moving stories can be daunting. Take Oct. 2 as an example. At 12:54 a.m., then-President Donald Trump tweeted that he and the first lady had tested positive for Covid-19. The diagnosis caused a surge in news production: In the news category “United States of America” — a topic including articles on the president — more than 44,000 stories were published that day. That’s 31 stories every minute. The S&P 500 Index fell 1% on that day.
Even engaged news consumers have a hard time staying informed, especially when markets react quickly and billions of dollars in value are on the line.
How to stay informed without being overwhelmed
Bloomberg has deployed cutting-edge technologies to help you sort through this enormous amount of information in a manageable and comprehensive way with a tool called Key Themes.
To access the new Key Themes feature that groups the flood of headlines down to the main topics, click on the yellow Key Themes button on the red toolbar.
Here’s how it works: Key Themes invokes a powerful proprietary artificial intelligence model that reads all news stories about a subject and groups similar articles together. Another machine-learning algorithm assigns a summary to each cluster. So instead of 44,000 stories on Oct. 2, you would see five easy-to-understand phrases that encapsulate the main themes of a topic in the Key Themes tool, such as the screen below.
You can quickly delve deeper with Key Themes and can use this summarization on any news search. For example, the same day Trump disclosed that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus, the U.S. released the all-important monthly nonfarm-payrolls report.
Navigating economic news can be a challenge, with more than 5,400 stories appearing in the “Economic News” category in those 24 hours. Key Themes makes it easy to quickly identify the most important news of the day — in this case, that U.S. job growth slowed in September. Use the shortcut on your terminal NI ECO <GO>.