When I left there was some ideias floating around to scrape not only news, but also statements given by public figures and central banks. There is an metagame of interpreting what Jerome Powell really meant at each phrase of his speech.

Nothing like that was done (and believe it's not being built), but we had a sorta smart news pipelines that filtered relevant news and send to analysts. As I said, we had not fired the analysts, we were teaming up with them. When there was a market shock or something very disruptive, the analysts took over and we would update the models.

But I have to say that even with radical events (such as the invasion of Ukraine), the models were not that far off. We had some anomaly detection on the pipeline

I used to work at a hedgefund and we used ml models to determine economic indexes such as CPI, GDP, etc. for a lot of countries with a pretty nice automation and pipelines.

We had analysts before looking at the same series + news + talking with other people. For some items the analyst is better, but for must part (and in the total game), the models are better.

Not a ton better tho, in a 1.5 year of development a small team outperformed slightly the analyst, but then they could do analysis for several countries with pretty much no work.

Cool stuff