News provider
Author: abegy
Creation Date: 9/14/2011 3:33 AM
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abegy

#1
WLD is a very nice trading tool for backtesting strategy but there are some missing features in my point of view.

The first one that it is very important is the possibility to backtest strategy with a Walk forward optimizer process. I know that I’m not the only one which requests this feature and hope that you will be able to integrate it in the next release. Neuroshell tool has a very nice tool for that. I hope that you will integrate a better one !

The second one is the Multi-currency capabilities. This is a nightmare to manage WLD without. This feature is important for trader like me from Europe because exchange markets have most of the time stocks quotation with different currencies (like Swiss exchange or London exchange). Please reconsider this need in your top priority. WLD is only for international trader so thinks international !

Another interesting feature could be an improvement of Neuro-Lab to be able to have additional neural network module. I had a discussion on that in a previous topic on the forum.

Just for memory, I will write you again that I would be great if you can offer broker specification or addin extension only for international customer with the appropriate security to be conforming to Fidelity requirements.

And my last wish is the possibility to have multi Provider source like I have described by using translating table file to be able to manage symbol code mutation.

If you can think also to add a provider extension to manage news, I would be great !
In any case, thank you for your tools and your great support !
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Eugene

#2
Thank you for your suggestions.

1. The Optimizer API has been open sice version 5.4. Motivated developers are free to develop an extension on their own and ask for help with the API.

Currently there's no plan to include WFO in Wealth-Lab, although I might be able to look at it late this year or early next year, after finishing the IB static/streaming provider. (Anyway, this has already been voiced on the forums.)

3. Have you already created a support ticket for your NL idea?

4. MS123 is legally bound with a non-competition agreement with Fidelity, so a broker provider (even as a code sample) is not planned and therefore will not happen.

Edit

5. We're not considering a provider to manage news at this time. A recently released fundamental provider that went open source by your request fits the bill of an example necessary to understand the principles of building it.
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Eugene

#3
EDIT Updated 01/13/2020 with a less restrictive list

QUOTE:
If you can think also to add a provider extension to manage news, I would be great !

What is your specific suggestion for a stock news feed that...

1) is accessible as single HTML page(s) or by XML, RSS, JSON with news for a given ticker
2) has a sufficient news history (months to years)
3) is subscription free
4) delivers the content with high "signal-to-noise ratio" (i.e. a news item for AAPL should really be a news for AAPL and not some news for an unrelated ticker like GOOG where AAPL is barely mentioned somewhere in the text)?

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abegy

#4
I was thinking of news accessible through free RSS (like Yahoo, Google or others) to be able to do something like that : buy_flag = ContainsWords('google_news', 'title', 'Buy,Increase,Up').

It would be interesting to be able to specify :
- RSS source
- Writter
- ticker news
- ticker inside news
- Where to look (title or inside the news)
- Which words to find
- date of publication


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Eugene

#5
Sorry if I wasn't enough clear but what I was actually looking for is a pointer to some particular web pages or feeds (URLs) which fully comply with the 4 bullet points above.

Given some spare time, then I might look at creating a new fundamental data provider (on a low priority basis) delivering news headers as fundamental items, if it's feasible/practical.

If you like to be able to specify it to that extent, please consider hiring a developer for that custom solution (not covered by our support policy).
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abegy

#6
I see that http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ALU/news?CountryCode=FR has more than 2 years online news for free and with international databases.
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Eugene

#7
Oops, fails on 1 (dynamically loaded content using Javascript) and 4 (too noisy e.g. see AAPL).
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abegy

#8
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Eugene

#9
Not sure if you noticed but we already have developed these two solutions:

Earnings Date Helper
Get symbol data from Finviz.com (company name, sector, industry, next earnings date)
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abegy

#10
Ok but Finviz is not an international solution. I don't find any symbol from Euronext France for example.
If you update your components, please do not forget to give the possibility to manage the symbol code (ALU for Euronext France is FR:ALU with MSN and ALU.PA with Yahoo).

You have the following website which are better than previous : http://www.fulldisclosure.com/dividend.asp?client=cb
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Eugene

#11
The original request was managing news and now you change the topic to earnings calendar and then again to dividends (btw available at Yahoo). Since every other post of yours is a feature request, let's concentrate on managing news first if you still need it? :)
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abegy

#12
Yes, you are right ! I prefer to continue in private for the news provider.
But, if it's possible, I'm very interesting if you can switch your current Finziv add-on to the earnings.com website
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Eugene

#13
QUOTE:
Yes, you are right ! I prefer to continue in private for the news provider.

Well, it's not really a private discussion, not a custom solution, so let's please keep where it started -- here on the forum.
QUOTE:
I'm very interesting if you can switch your current Finziv add-on to the earnings.com website

The code is open so please feel free to modify it. If you have questions with that, fire away (in a new thread).
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abegy

#14
Source of news can be Reuters website which provides News (see http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/IBM.N/key-developments).

Except that, you have also directly exchange like NYSE which provides history database of SEC Filings (see http://secfilings.nyse.com/files.php?symbol=IBM) but it's limited to NYSE Stocks.

Sorry but I don't see any others source of news.
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Eugene

#15
#1 That Reuters source seems to be a very "low noise" feed, thanks for the key developments link. Not sure how deep would I like to go with regard to those "Next page" links though. This so far is number 1.

#2 Anyway, together with your Google RSS feed where the history depth is customizable by now we have two candidates:

http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NYSE:ZMH&output=rss&num=100 (although its "noise" is higher than Reuters)
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abegy

#16
Direclty on Reuters website, you have history back to 2009 (see last page number 38 for IBM)
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Eugene

#17
My concern about going through the pages is slowing the download time down and not knowing where to stop (and no way I'd be adding a GUI control just for that single option - that would conflict with my design principles).

A downside of Reuters' news is that their key developments are in fact neutral. Not a big deal of course, just it won't be possible to codify a news as positive/negative or bearish/bullish. There's no "sign" in the newsfeed.
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abegy

#18
Agree with you. But I haven't found a free database source of news from another international providers.

What I have seen also is that most of others trading tools use only Real time news from RSS feed without database history. It means that you can trade live news but without the possibility to backtest the strategy.
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Eugene

#19
QUOTE:
Direclty on Reuters website, you have history back to 2009 (see last page number 38 for IBM)

Hey Alexandre,

How did you manage to find out the last page number for IBM, #38? Couldn't see that on their website unless I manually typed the number in the browser address bar? (BTW now the last page has become 37). Otherwise we're seriously limited to latest dozen news items with Reuters.

p.s. Have you already tried out the Classification groups feature you requested?
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Eugene

#20
Meet our first news provider for Wealth-Lab 6:

Google Finance RSS feed in

MS123 Extra Fundamental/News Providers

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Cone

#21
Awesome job here Eugene. This is really a milestone for Wealth-Lab!
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Eugene

#22
EDIT 01/13/2020 reviewed

Thanks. We've just started with news and sentiment. More to come (and hopefully a TSL someday).

Just for record, here are some sources that didn't make it (failed on either one of my criteria set from 9/29/2011 4:39 AM):

http://feeds.finance.yahoo.com/rss/2.0/headline?s=symbol&region=US&lang=en-US (returns last N items i.e. just days of news for an active stock, not worth it)
http://www.smartmoney.com/rss/tickernews.cfm?ticker=symbol (Depreciated by 2020)
http://www.streetinsider.com/freefeed.php?ticker=symbol (Too many irrelevant items, very low signal-to-noise ratio)
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Eugene

#23
Customer asked and Wealth-Lab listened: the Reuters news feed is now available as well.

Install the MS123 Extra Fundamental/News Providers extension or update it to v2012.01 to power up your analysis with this high "signal-to-noise" historical news source!
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Eugene

#24
A couple of tech notes on the new Reuters historical newsfeed. Its speed is not as fast as Google's (that just has to read one RSS feed which is equivalent to an XML/HTML page). The provider has to traverse through multiple HTML pages. The number of downloadable pages is capped at 40 (AFAIR) but downloading stops when the provider detects there's no more HTML pages with news returned by the feed. Downloads are processed in a multi-threaded, asychronous manner to speed things up.
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Eugene

#25
As our Google news provider is decommissioned let's look into potential alternatives. We're interested in sources of key developments only i.e. high Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Here are some candidates that I've reviewed and rejected:

https://www.thestreet.com/quote/BNPQF/details/news.html
- extremely low SNR (i.e. not key developments style) for U.S stocks


http://feeds.finance.yahoo.com/rss/2.0/headline?s=BNP.PA&region=US&lang=en-US
- only 25 latest items (~2 days for an active U.S. stock symbol)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/h?s=BNP.PA
- low SNR, hard to extract


https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/bnpqf/press-releases
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/bnpqf/news-headlines
- not enough content
- for active U.S. stocks, a too low signal-to-noise ratio


https://www.streetinsider.com/freefeed.php?ticker=BNPQF
- wildly duplicate items, not enough content


https://www.marketwatch.com/news/headline/getheadlines?ticker=bnpqf
- mediocre SNR, few items
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Eugene

#26
Found a Google news alternative: Wall Street Journal. It's easy to parse, has low network traffic, loads fast, covers up to 2 years of news for non-US symbols. Not as good for active U.S. symbols, though - too few historic news with a low SNR.

http://quotes.wsj.com/

Check it out once v2018.04 is released.
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Eugene

#27
In version 2019.09 of MS123 Fundamental/News providers library, made an improvement to speed up fundamental data update of WSJ News and Reuters News providers. If you have unsupported symbols (think options, Forex, international symbols etc.) across your DataSets, these will be ignored for speed's sake.
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Eugene

#28
An important update to Reuters news users about phase-out of the data provider:

Reuters News halts after some symbols update

Consider the WSJ news provider as the replacement source of historical stock news (download link).
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superticker

#29
It response to the "free" WSJ news provider being discontinued, I might consider a paid subscription for a news provider if it was meaningful, reliable, and graded the news item (good, bad, indifferent) to some extent. Sounds like the free providers don't do this.

Fidelity's website provides news. Can that be scraped and graded? It would be nice if Fidelity provided a news feed connector to its customers (especially its best customers, which all use Wealth-Lab) for this.
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Eugene

#30
Thanks for your suggestion. Took a brief look at Fidelity's website. Without login it does not seem to provide considerable news depth to me.

Of course a native feed would be nice but I guess there should be more demand expressed for them to consider it.
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superticker

#31
QUOTE:
Without login it does not seem to provide considerable news depth to me.
But Wealth-Lab is logged in. If it needs another cookie, let's add that to the Wealth-Lab login (with all the others it now has). That shouldn't be a problem.

@Cone, can we add another login cookie to the Wealth-Lab login to get access to a Fidelity news feed server?

QUOTE:
a native feed would be nice
Right. The trouble with scraping any website (including Fidelity's) is the provider implementation breaks each time the website changes. Not ideal.
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Eugene

#32
What I mean to say is that without a Fidelity login (think WLD customers and even me) it would not be a universal solution. We've got international customers who use Wealth-Lab Developer without access to fidelity.com for whom such WLP-centric news provider would be useless. Plus I don't think fidelity.com delivers news for international (overseas) symbols, don't they?

The signal-to-noise ratio doesn't look very exciting either. There are just too many news items flooding the history. I prefer a "key developments only" style.

Suggestions are welcome but please see post #3 above for the selection criteria. So far it's been really tough to find good candidates!
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Eugene

#33
New candidates:

1. SeekingAlpha

https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/BNPQF?news=news-all

+ Not bad. Has pagination but no biggie.
- Captcha protection against bots :(

2. Zacks

https://www.zacks.com/stock/research/A/all-news

- Signal-to-noise not sufficient, not enough history
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kelvinyip

#34
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/ is easy to use. view source shows just raw html and I think we can parse it easier
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Eugene

#35
Too few news items here (not enough history to be useful in backtests which is our primary objective):
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=symbol&insttype=&freq=&show=

Re: another MW website, see posts #7 and #25 above:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/symbol
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Eugene

#36
Meet our new fundamental provider that delivers historical news:

SeekingAlpha news provider

Starting from v2020.02 of the extension, it replaces WSJ News provider (now decommissioned).
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