Using News Articles and Financial Data to predict the likelihood of bankruptcy

Over the past decade, millions of companies have filed for bankruptcy. This has been caused by a plethora of reasons, namely, high interest rates, heavy debts and government regulations. The effect of a company going bankrupt can be devastating, hurting not only workers and shareholders, but also clients, suppliers and any related external companies. One of the aims of this paper is to provide a framework for company bankruptcy to be predicted by making use of financial figures, provided by our external dataset, in conjunction with the sentiment of news articles about certain sectors. News articles are used to attempt to quantify the sentiment on a company and its sector from an external perspective, rather than simply using internal figures. This work builds on previous studies carried out by multiple researchers, to bring us closer to lessening the impact of such events.

Investigating the influence Brexit had on Financial Markets, in particular the GBP/EUR exchange rate

On 23rd June 2016, 51.9% of British voters voted to leave the European Union, triggering a process and events that have led to the United Kingdom leaving the EU, an event that has become known as 'Brexit'. In this piece of research, we investigate the effects of this entire process on the currency markets, specifically the GBP/EUR exchange rate. Financial markets are known to be sensitive to news articles and media, and the aim of this research is to evaluate the magnitude of impact of relevant events, as well as whether the impact was positive or negative for the GBP.