Thomson Reuters, the information provider, will on Friday launch a system designed to predict market volatility using real-time news feeds, as traders focus on future price movements in preference to historical data as the main basis for their automated trading systems.

It comes after a period of 18 months during which sudden spikes in volatility have become the norm and the quantitative and automated models used by many traders, the bulk of which rely largely on historical data, have proved unreliable at dealing with it.