CityFALCON Q4 2020 Update — More Languages, Features, Cash

Ruzbeh Bacha
7 min readJan 7, 2021

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Get excited to participate in the markets with CityFALCON!

At CityFALCON, we closed 2020 on a strong note, despite the upheaval of the year. Our last update was way back in September. This one details what we’ve done since then.

Tap the links at the beginning of each summary point to jump to that section in the article (other links lead to outside pages):

SENTIMENT FOR RETAIL CONSUMERS

We have provided sentiment scores for API clients for much of the year. Now our web and mobile users can take advantage of sentiment, too.

Sentiment currently comes in two styles: an average and historical charts.

For single-topic sentiment, such as on individual company pages, the sentiment takes the average across all of the stories in the specified timeframe. On multi-topic watchlists, the average is weighted according to the topics in the watchlist, reflecting their influence.

Sentiment for ESG-related Watchlist

But it gets even better! Open up the chart and get the top news for each point:

Sentiment Chart with News

Being able to combine a clean visual chart and news is a powerful tool to gain insight into why the market viewed your topics positively or negatively. Pair this with our news on price charts and you have a strong foundation for understanding the markets.

Check it out on the some individual topics pages:

SENTIMENT FILTERS

Visualisations and a single-number average nicely sum up all the content for a watchlist or topic. But you might want to only see stories that have a certain sentiment. Well, we offer that functionality, too.

You can change the sentiment levels, using either preset levels (very positive, negative, etc.) or using a numerical range (e.g., -80% to -5%). You can find the sentiment filter under the regular story filters. Try it out on a FAANGM watchlist.

Sentiment Filters for Stories

£1.2 MILLION RAISED IN 2020

Over the past year, risk appetite plunged as the coronavirus surged across the world. Even in such conditions, we managed to raise more than £1.2 million through two funding rounds. The first one, at the beginning of the year, was equity-based and raised a little over £600k.

Equity-Based Round Early 2020

The latest one, in Q4 2020, took advantage of the UK government’s Future Fund scheme, financed via convertible debt. This one also raised about £600k, half coming from the UK government.

Future Fund Round in Late 2020

CityFALCON has never been so cash rich, and we are fortunate to have raised so much in such a harsh year. This money provides us runway into 2022 so we can move closer to being cash-flow positive and bringing you even more features and data.

MORE NLU LANGUAGES — GERMAN, ITALIAN, PORTUGUESE, CHINESE

We’ve expanded our NLU language coverage this year considerably. While we still source content in 30+ languages, we now perform advanced NLU on 8 Core languages. When we process content for our Core languages, we add significant value with our NLU models over traditional keyword matching. Such NLU processing enables our content to be more relevant to financial content consumption, even if a keyword search would return multiple irrelevant instances.

Before December 2020, our coverage included English, Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Spanish. In December 2020, we added German, Italian, and Portuguese. Chinese is in the final stages of testing, and we will also release Polish, Romanian, and multiple Balkan languages in January.

We continue our R&D project in collaboration with the University of Malta, which aims to use automated means to expand our NLU coverage from just a few languages to over 90. As this project progresses, we can provide NLU-enhanced delivery of content in those 90+ languages with better accuracy than simple keyword matching, ensuring high.

NLU and the Power of Machine Learning

EVEN MORE LANGUAGES — BLOG IN SPANISH, RUSSIAN, FRENCH

We are a global company, and we love languages. Beyond receiving and processing content in many languages, we are producing content, too. Our blogs, written in English, are now posted in other languages, too. We continue to write the originals in English, but, if you are more comfortable reading in another language, you can read the translations shortly after we publish our English version.

At the end of December 2020, our blog is available in Spanish, Russian, and French. Many others are coming in 2021.

Try it by changing the language with the menu in the top right of this page.

Read the Blog in Your Language

NEW LAYOUT OPTIONS FOR WEB

After considering user feedback, we’ve created a new layout using tiles, and we’ve made our row layout cleaner yet more compact. Choose your preferred option in the News Feed Layout filter. Visit your watchlists to switch between layouts.

Choice of layout: tiles vs rows

FONT SCALING FOR MOBILE

Some users were asking for easier-to-read font sizes; others were asking for smaller font for a more compact view. To make everyone happy, we have implemented dynamic font scaling on the mobile app.

Find the font scaling slider in More > Display Settings.

Scale font for easier reading or more compactness

PRICE CHARTS WITH NEWS FOR MOBILE

Mobile app users can now view price charts for individual stocks and cryptocurrencies. On an individual company page, like Apple’s, tap the price or More > Charts and you can view that company’s stock chart.

Just like the web, tap the chart to get the price, volume, and associated news.

Price chart for Apple — tap the chart to get news!

Get the iOS App or the Android App, test out the features, then rate and give feedback.

SOME AUDIOVISUAL GUIDANCE

We just keep building more and more features, and we realise our product and platform are complex. Sometimes you can get lost or not even know where to start. So we are building up a library of videos to help you out.

Most videos are filmed twice, once for the desktop platform and once for the mobile apps. In Q4 2020, we recorded and posted videos for accessing filings from the SEC, LSE RNS, and Companies House.

VALUE INVESTING CLUB WEBINARS ARE BACK

First, congratulations to members who made 75% returns thanks to the Salesforce acquisition of Slack. We discussed Slack often at previous meetups, and companies in a similar space have only become more interesting with Covid and the new remote working trend. It’s really cool to see members make such phenomenal returns on normal equity investments.

The last quarter of 2020 was quite busy for us, and, unfortunately, we had no time to conduct meetups or webinars. We will be back with a webinar in January, though, and we’ll be discussing

  • Markets in 2020
  • What 2021 will look like for markets, including IPOs
  • Pandemic tech and Slackforce
  • Cryptos, which are popping up again

Sign up for your preferred time slot:

Originally published at https://www.cityfalcon.com on January 7, 2021.

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