'Trump & Dump' program aims to profit off Trump tweets to save puppies

[NEW YORK] Techies have devised a program to execute quickfire stock trades to take advantage of President Donald Trump's Twitter habit of blackballing individual companies.

And the president's tweets are saving puppies, since when the program earns money, the funds are donated to an animal welfare group.

The "Trump & Dump" artificial intelligence program identifies Mr Trump's market-moving tweets, assesses instantaneously whether the sentiment is positive or negative and then executes a speedy trade.

Ben Gaddis, president of Austin, Texas marketing and technology company T3, said the idea was sparked by watching Mr Trump's actions during his transition, when twitter attacks of companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin sent the share prices tumbling.

"Everyone is asking themselves how to deal with the unpredictability of Trump's tweets," Mr Gaddis told AFP. T3's response was to develop a "bot", a piece of software that does automated tasks, to trade on the information.

The company has so far been pleased with the results, which yielded "significant winnings" on two occasions and a "slight" loss on a third trade, Mr Gaddis said.

In early January, T3 scored a "huge" profit by betting Toyota's share price would fall after Mr Trump lambasted the automaker for building cars in Mexico, it said in a short video on the T3 website.

The time lag between the Trump tweet and T3 trade was only a second, according to a short video on the T3 website.

T3, which has pictures of numerous dogs on its website and describes itself as having "dog friendly offices" is donating the earnings from the bot-directed trades to American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

"So now, when President Trump tweets, we save a puppy," the video said.