Three birds, one stone
Austin, Texas is a scrappy town. We turned “weird” into a badge of honor, and we eat tacos for every meal. We do things our own way, and we do them well. And now, local “Innovation Agency” T3 is doing their part to Keep Austin Weird by playing the stock market according to Donald Trump’s tweets, and using the profits to save puppies at the ASPCA.
Seeing an opportunity
Prior to inauguration, the world took notice of Donald Trump’s fickle, domineering, and often unpresidential Twitter presence. Ethics experts called out conflict of interest red flags left and right.
In January, cable media criticized then-President-Elect Trump’s tweeting a direct endorsement of L.L. Bean after news of board member Linda Bean’s $60,000 Trump campaign donation caused many to boycott the clothing brand. Some say he was defending someone’s right to donate to any politician they desire, others cry foul.
Opportunities abound for legal and ethics authorities to debate the legality and general singularity of a president who publicly endorses and targets brands.
This will not be definitively decided in the near future, if only because Trump just keeps it coming. No one can catch their breath for long enough to focus on any one instance of extraordinary tweeting.
Trump and Dump bot
In the meantime, though, T3 is making money. On January 30, Trump blamed Delta for airport chaos in the wake of his immigration ban, and T3 used that information to make a 4.47 percent profit.
[clickToTweet tweet=”T3 built the ‘Trump and Dump’ bot to capitalize on the unpredictability of Trump’s Twitter targets.” quote=”The marketing and advertising agency built the ‘Trump and Dump’ bot to capitalize on the unpredictability of Trump’s Twitter targets.”]
The bot analyzes the President’s tweets for references to publicly traded companies, and then executes a “sentimental analysis” of the relevant tweets to check for words like “big problems” and “caused by” (both found in the infamous Delta tweet).
How it works
The bot then assigns each tweet a sentiment ranking, and if this ranking is low enough, the bot dashes to E-trade to borrow a bunch of the relevant company’s stock. That all takes less than a second – pretty much the same amount of time some say Trump allotted to thinking about the tweet behind it all.
Before the stock tanks, the Trump and Dump bot sells its shares, and buys them back cheap when they’ve gone far down.
Most importantly, the profits all go to the ASPCA.
[clickToTweet tweet=”“Tweets Analyzed. Stocks Shorted. Puppies Saved.”” quote=”“Tweets Analyzed. Stocks Shorted. Puppies Saved.””]
T3’s video includes all this information and more in snappy animation form.
Social and political innovation
T3 is currently the only company openly using a bot quite like this, but it’s bound to catch on. We’ve got four years of presidential power plays to put to good use.
