Google X engineer writes a bot that turns Trump's tweets into money for Planned Parenthood

Max Braun is the software lead for robotics at Google X. In his spare time he's written a bot that buys and shorts stocks based on Trump's tweets about publicly traded companies. The gains go to the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Resources Defense Council, and Planned Parenthood.

From his Medium post:

What if you wrote some code that constantly monitors Trumps feed and analyzes each tweet for mentions of publicly traded companies? Then, youd immediately trade the affected stocks based on the detected sentiment: buy if positive and short if negative. The whole thing could be 100% automated.

I just finished writing a bot which does exactly that. For your convenience, it also tweets out a summary as @Trump2Cash each time it springs into action.

Overall, the algorithm seems to succeed more often than not: The simulated fund has an annualized return of about 59% since inception. There are limits to the simulation and the underlying data, so take it all with a grain of salt.