News-Sentiment Trading Signal Backtester
Filed in 2002, before 'NLP' meant much more than keyword rules and bag-of-words models. Expired ten months before ChatGPT shipped and NLP became a household word.
Stock market prediction using natural language processing · Fred Herz Patents, LLC · filed 2002-01-22 · granted 2012-10-09 · expired 2022-01-22
Playable, self-contained demo. Nothing is sent anywhere; it runs entirely in your browser.
The story
US8285619 claims using natural language processing on news text to predict stock market moves — filed January 22, 2002, back when 'natural language processing' meant hand-tuned linguistic rules and word-frequency statistics, not anything that could read a headline the way a modern model does.
Its term ran out on its own twentieth anniversary, January 22, 2022. ChatGPT launched that November — ten months later. The patent that might have made licensing 'run an LLM over financial news and trade the sentiment' a genuine commercial question went free right before that question started getting asked by everyone.
This is its full resurrection, not a loose gaming-style analogy: the exact patent behind this exact demo. Below, a working backtester runs sentiment scoring over headline text against historical price series — the pattern the 2002 filing described, playable with nobody's permission required.
See also: the fuller story of this patent, its abandonment window, and why it expired at exactly the wrong (right) moment, at /stories/nlp-us8285619.