August 30, 2008
Current Stock Prices
It is a fact of life that press releases influence the current price of a stock. People react emotionally and buy stocks on good press releases, and sell stocks on bad ones, regardless of the validity of the press release. If you can get the news first, you can be in a favorable position to take advantage and gain financially. This article describes how to obtain online stock press releases when they are first announced.
One way to be the first to obtain online press releases on stocks would be to constantly watch one or more of the financial News web pages for a press release via Business Wire. Yahoo provides a popular and reliable financial news web page (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw). But manually watching web pages requires your full time attention. Unless you are some rich tycoon who sits by a Palm Springs swimming pool reading the financial news web pages as they update, this is probably not going to work for you. Like most people you probably have other things to do, such as working for a living.
A better way to accomplish the task of monitoring the financial news web pages would be to have someone or something else do it for you, and then notify you. For instance, you can use web page watching software on your computer or you can subscribe to a web page watching service on the Internet.
Running software on your computer to monitor a financial news web page, such as Yahoo’s, is easy to do and gives you complete control over when and what you want to watch for. It can also give you faster notification on press release discoveries. There are many programs available on the web to do this. Easy Web Page Watcher by Patrick DiRienzo (http://www.patdirienzo.com) is an easy-to-use low cost program ($15) that does a very good job of monitoring Yahoo and other financial news web pages. To use the program simply enter the financial news web pages that you wish to monitor and the name of your stocks. When the name of your stock appears on the web page in a press release, your computer when notify you with an audible alarm and by email. You can also watch for keyword phrases such as “contract awarded” or “stock buyback” that would appear in any stock press release. If you have full time broadband Internet access such as cable or DSL you can leave the program running all day and night. The program runs in the background with no disturbance to your other computer tasks. You can set up the program to send you email alerts at work or anywhere else.
If you do not have full time Internet access, but have email, the next best method of obtaining press releases automatically is to subscribe to a web page watching service. Again there are many services that do this. WatchThatPage (http://www.watchthatpage.com) is a free web page watching service that will alert you by email when keywords you specify such as the names of your stocks appear in press releases on financial news pages you specify. The disadvantage is that you do not receive an instant audible alarm when the press release is first noticed on the financial news web page. You have to wait for the service to send you email before you hear about the press release.
|
About The Author Bill Peifer holds a degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering and has written several computer technology related articles. Every morning the trader sits down at his computer to begin the day, and the dilemma faced is always the same - finding a stock or two or three to make a buck on for that day. This really shouldn’t be that hard, but for some traders it is. Let’s see if we can break it down and maybe make it a little easier. First let’s start with a few basics about your work habits. The markets open at 9:30 EST, right? WRONG! Trading these days starts at 7 A.M.! That’s the very early morning action. Then you have what some traders call the official pre-market trading that starts at 8 A.M. following that is the official market opening at 9:30 A.M. EST. This means that if you have been sleeping in, you could be missing some very interesting early morning trades. However, a word of caution here - pre marketing trading also has a higher element of risk attached to it because of a lack of liquidity. Okay, so now that I have gotten you out of bed, you can start scanning the pages of Wall-Street Journal, Independent Business Daily and… WRONG again! Oh sure, you may find a trade or two in one of these publications, but in all too many cases that news is going be too old to trade. In addition, the news in those publications, or the reaction by the stock, is going to show up in other places. The first thing you may want to do in the morning is check the after hours action from the day before. This information can be found a number of places. I use the NASDAQ home page under the Extended Hours Trading link found on the left side of the page. This will give you a list of the stocks that were most active in after hours for the day before. In most cases these stocks are moving on news released after the close. These links as well as others can be found at www.TraderAide.com. While you are on the NASDAQ page make sure you take note of the Pre-Market Most Active list. This is going to be another great source of potential stocks for you to consider. An additional source on the NASDAQ page is the NASDAQ-100 Pre-Market Heat Map. This is especially useful right at the beginning and for the first hour of so after the beginning of the 5 A.M. premarket trading action. In both cases, after-hours movers and pre-market movers, the action is usually news related. An excellent source of this news is MarketWatch. You can find it in a hundred other locations on the net, but I find the MarketWatch site easy to use and even more important, easier to search. It is also less likely to be full of non-trading” news that you really don’t need to trade. A few of the things you want to be looking for include events on stocks that take place nearly every day, such as: analyst up/downgrades; earnings reports’ and FDA actions which could include approval, disapprovals or merely making comments on application. I also suggest you watch Bloomberg TV early in the morning, before the 5 A.M. premarket trading begins. I prefer Bloomberg to CNBC at this time in the morning because of their presentation of the futures and the news streamer on the bottom of the screen. Once the pre market opens I suggest you change over to CNBC simply because they have, what appears to be, a much larger audience. On CNBC the stocks reported on or mentioned are often sent up or down, offering excellent trading opportunities in many cases. Once the markets opens, almost all real-time quote systems have an element built into them that will give you at least the top ten most active on the three main exchanges, both gainers and losers. Also, they may have a more advanced “screener” of some sort. With RealTick by Townsend Analytics, Ltd, it’s called Hottrend Realtime Radar. You can leave this running throughout the day. Stocks that show unusual volume compared to their historic volume patterns will show up automatically on the Radar. It is available for both NASDAQ and NYSE traded stocks. Check with your supplier to see if this feature, or something like it, is offered. Last but not least, you want to be checking your Dow Jones news feed for the latest breaking news starting at about 6:30 A.M., New York time. Sorry “West Coasters, but as the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that is where the money is”. Happy trading! No permission is needed to reproduce an unedited copy of this article as long the About The Author tag is left in tact and hot links included. Questions and comments can be sent to Floyd at floyd@TraderAide.com. About the AuthorFloyd Snyder has been trading and investing in the stock market for three decades. He was on the forefront of the day trading craze that swept the nation back in the late 1990’s, both as a trader and as the moderator of one of the Internet’s largest real time trading rooms, http://Daytraders.com. He is the owner of http://www.TraderAide.com and Strictly Business Magazine at http://www.sbmag.org Tags: Stock Investment Can Be A Good Thing Quickly bookmark Current Stock Prices at:           
Current Stock PricesIt is a fact of life that press releases influence the current price of a stock. People react emotionally and buy stocks on good press releases, and sell stocks on bad ones, regardless of the validity of the press release. If you can get the news first, you can be in a favorable position to take advantage and gain financially. This article describes how to obtain online stock press releases when they are first announced. One way to be the first to obtain online press releases on stocks would be to constantly watch one or more of the financial News web pages for a press release via Business Wire. Yahoo provides a popular and reliable financial news web page (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw). But manually watching web pages requires your full time attention. Unless you are some rich tycoon who sits by a Palm Springs swimming pool reading the financial news web pages as they update, this is probably not going to work for you. Like most people you probably have other things to do, such as working for a living. A better way to accomplish the task of monitoring the financial news web pages would be to have someone or something else do it for you, and then notify you. For instance, you can use web page watching software on your computer or you can subscribe to a web page watching service on the Internet. Running software on your computer to monitor a financial news web page, such as Yahoo’s, is easy to do and gives you complete control over when and what you want to watch for. It can also give you faster notification on press release discoveries. There are many programs available on the web to do this. Easy Web Page Watcher by Patrick DiRienzo (http://www.patdirienzo.com) is an easy-to-use low cost program ($15) that does a very good job of monitoring Yahoo and other financial news web pages. To use the program simply enter the financial news web pages that you wish to monitor and the name of your stocks. When the name of your stock appears on the web page in a press release, your computer when notify you with an audible alarm and by email. You can also watch for keyword phrases such as “contract awarded” or “stock buyback” that would appear in any stock press release. If you have full time broadband Internet access such as cable or DSL you can leave the program running all day and night. The program runs in the background with no disturbance to your other computer tasks. You can set up the program to send you email alerts at work or anywhere else. If you do not have full time Internet access, but have email, the next best method of obtaining press releases automatically is to subscribe to a web page watching service. Again there are many services that do this. WatchThatPage (http://www.watchthatpage.com) is a free web page watching service that will alert you by email when keywords you specify such as the names of your stocks appear in press releases on financial news pages you specify. The disadvantage is that you do not receive an instant audible alarm when the press release is first noticed on the financial news web page. You have to wait for the service to send you email before you hear about the press release.
|
Leave a comment