DIY Financial News Feed

Although our trading decision during the day is mainly based on our understanding of the price structure and how the markets unfold in real-time, we still need to be aware of news shocks and pre-scheduled economic announcements. It is nice to know what is affecting the market when these events hit the major newswires. It is well known that timely delivery of breaking news from the major financial news services like Bloomberg, Reuters are Dow Jones are very expensive. For someone who just started out trading, these professional services are really out of reach. After some research and experiment, I have created a solution for retail traders that has decent performance and is absolutely free.

Quick Start Guide For Those Just Like To Use The Feed

1. Get a Twitter account if you do not have one yet. https://twitter.com/

2. Subscribe to the DIY Financial News Feed. https://twitter.com/DaytradingBias/lists/diy-financial-news-feed

3. Open TweetDeck to get the news feed streaming. https://tweetdeck.twitter.com

Tweetdeck platform is designed with those who tweet a lot in mind. If you do not like the interface you can always look for other twitter streamer alternatives.

Twitter The Most Under Utilized News Tool

Most people think that twitter is mainly a tool for teens to follow their idols. That’s true still but twitter is slowly evolving into a tool for people to communicate breaking events and news. This created what media often dubbed as the twitter sphere of influence among the most followed twitter accounts.

A thought came to me earlier this year to find out if the financial news would be available somehow through some of the power twitter accounts. They may not be instantaneous like the expensive services. But if it is close enough, the traders will still benefit a lot from the information.

So I embark on this research for the right twitter accounts to combine together so that a free or very cheap financial news feed can become available to beginner and retail traders.

Research Of The Best Financial and Major Event Twitters

I looked through the past tweets from like 200 financial matters reporting twitter accounts. My criteria is not that they produce all the breaking news like the major news wire services. Nor do we need the tweets to contain the details of the breaking news. Instead, what traders need are the more important news headlines that are delivered as timely as possible. I identified the ones that actually deliver the important news as close to the major services as possible. From this point onward, I just need a way to combine them together.

I used both economic reports and some unusual events as my references to rank these twitter accounts. What I found out from the process is that each and every one of the financial news twitters tweet only some of the events and left out the others. In combination, however, they pretty much cover all the major headlines.

At the end I picked a selected few and proceeded to combine them into a single feed using Twitter’s List function.

Use TweetDeck Online To Get Streaming News

Since normal twitter does not show the latest tweets, it is necessary to use other tools to get the news feed streaming in real-time.

There are quite a number of ways to get the news feed refreshed including many browser add-ons.

However, those add-ons are not as efficient as TweetDeck as it is now part of Twitter and it is quite easy to use once you learn a few things about it. The main advantage of TweetDeck is platform independent so you do not need to marry yourself to a particular type of devices (e.g. Windows, Mac, Android, etc.) when pulling real-time news from Twitter.

Summary

I am impressed by this news feed that I have created. Not only you can get the important economic data at speed near those from the major news wires. You also get important breaking news when you are puzzling why the market suddenly swinging wildly. Knowing that your market is being moved by news can help you determine what resolution to choose from in such situations. In other words, a news feed can help you make informed decision just by making you aware of the market movement is news induced or not.

The news feed is a low maintenance ongoing project. Going forward, there is a maintenance issue for which some twitter accounts will have to be removed because they are no longer delivering timely news. Famous twitter accounts are often deleted if the companies behind the accounts deem that they are not beneficial to their bottom line. There will also be good twitter accounts to be included into the news feed as they are created in the future. If you subscribe to my DIY Financial News Feed, you can save yourself the hassle of making these changes as I have someone taking care of it.

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