Liquidnet has acquired Prattle, a provider of automated investment research solutions for portfolio managers and research analysts.
As part of the acquisition, Liquidnet’s global network of asset managers will have access to a set of investment analytics leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies across both structured and unstructured data.
Prattle provides a natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning system to produce analytics that measure sentiment and predict the market impact of publicly available content including central bank and corporate communications.
Asset managers can use these analytics to understand and anticipate relevant market movement, strengthen investment theses and inform trading strategies.
The announcement follows Liquidnet’s recent acquisition of RSRCHXchange, a marketplace and aggregator for asset managers to consume, discover, and purchase investment research, and the 2017 acquisition of OTAS Technologies.
Evan Schnidman and Bill MacMillan, CEO and CTO of Prattle, respectively, will continue to oversee the firm’s day-to-day operations. They will both report directly to Brian Conroy, Liquidnet president.
Conroy said: “Prattle is yet another powerful tool for asset managers to discover actionable insight from the enormous amounts of unstructured data that is produced throughout the capital markets.”
He added: “This acquisition further supports our goal to help our members generate better performance by providing them with the data they need to create greater conviction in their investment ideas, and then execute those ideas with speed and efficiency.”
Schnidman commented: “Our proprietary NLP and data science technology are an ideal complement to Liquidnet’s AI-driven analytics platform, and we’re eager to be part of its growing global investment network. We’re looking forward to working closely with Liquidnet to develop an integrated solution.”
