The Arizona Financial Text system (AZFinText) ingests large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then uses the former to figure out how to predict the latter.

Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes — and it never holds a stock for longer.

The system concentrates on proper nouns — people and companies — and combines information about their frequency with stock prices at the moment a news article is released. Using a machine learning algorithm on historical data, the creators look for correlations that can be used to predict future stock prices.