Filtering by News?

by TraderMike 24 days ago

I want to share another email I got about filtering:

I am new to swing bot and trying to work better with it, i was wondering if there was a way to filter stocks by recent news?
My response was:

I'm sorry but there's not a way to do that.  All I get is headlines and even then, it's (mostly) only what's available on Yahoo Finance -- so stuff like upgrades & downgrades are missing.  What kind of things would you like to be able to do?
The answer was:

i was mostly looking for headlines, so and so bought this, so and so announces financials
And to that my response is that I'm fine with adding such a filter.  I've actually been considering doing adding this for a long time because I'd like to track companies doing secondary offerings.  However I can imagine some issues right off the bat, such as:

  • As I mentioned above, there are a lot of news/headlines that I don't / can't get. 
  • I only pull news a couple of times per day and it's not practical / feasible to do much more than that, so this won't be a real-time news search
  • Things may be worded in strange/unexpected ways.  For example, an earnings announcement may contain "earnings" or "financials" or "Qx results".  So you may have to get creative with your searching
  • A lot of media outlets like to do clickbait-ish headlines these days, so you often won't see the actual keywords in the headline.  Instead of "Company X got FDA approval" the headline might say "Why Company X is soaring today..."
  • A company might put out a press release weeks ahead of an actual event, so something may not be actionable immediately
  • Along those lines, do I need to have a time requirement along with the search... something like "within the last X days" where you can choose X.
I'm also wondering if this should be a stand-alone search vs being a filter than you can "stack" on top of one of SwingTradeBot's technical scans.  So for example, should I add this to the filters on the "All Stocks" page or include it on the advanced filters tab which is on all the technical scans? 

Anyone else want to see a news filter?  Have thoughts on any of the things I raised above?


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Dr_Duru 24 days ago

I had not thought of the numerous limitations of a headline filter. It speaks to using AI to scan the actual content to get truly valuable information.
Given those limitations, I would rather scan twitter for keywords on certain feeds or even the news feed available on google where you might get the benefit of AI summaries. And then there is stocktwits which offers plenty of news headlines: https://stocktwits.com/news-articles
Bottom-line for me, I have never been much for scanning news headlines. It's time-consuming work. I am guessing the big money folks have applications that specialize in culling news feeds and headlines.

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TraderMike 24 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to check out the Google & StockTwits featured you mentioned. 

Despite the probable flaws, I could still see headline search in STB being useful in limited cases, such as my wanting to find companies doing secondaries.   In that situation it's not really time critical.  I'd just want a list of stocks to watch once the secondaries are actually priced, which is usally a few days after they're announced. 

My primary concern is people's expectations being too high about how effective a headline search tool could be.

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