Bloomberg has invested heavily in news automation. Reports that LVMH may acquire Tiffany helps explain why.

Bloomberg News reporters broke the news LVMH was mulling a takeover of Tiffany on Oct. 26th.

The day before Bloomberg Automation published two stories, one flagged a nine-fold increase in trading volume and the other showed a surge in option volume. Those followed three similar articles on Oct. 24th.

The price for Nov. 8 call options was 96 cents on Oct 23. By Friday, the price had skyrocketed to $6. When trading opened Monday, the options were quoted at $32.

I wouldn’t argue that automated stories broke the news – it took reporters to do that – but they did signal that something unusual was happening.

And this happens a lot. Today Google was reported to be in talks to acquire Fitbit. Bloomberg ran automated stories about Fitbit options surging on Oct. 25.

At Bloomberg we leverage human knowledge about markets to trigger automated stories. Those highlight price fluctuations that would otherwise remain obscure.

By translating the data into articles in plain English, we make the information accessible and understandable.

The LVMH bid helps explain why we see news automation as one of a handful of technologies transforming the landscape for news in fintech.