I’ve used Yahoo Finance for over 15 years.? I think it is the best single free news source for companies on the web.? If you know a better source, please mention it in the comments.
But there is a lot of low value data in their news feeds, so I created a utility to eliminate the bad stuff.? The link to it is in step 11 below.? I’m sharing one of my tools with you.? I hope it works well for you if you try it.
Procedure
- Using your browser, go to Yahoo Finance, and choose one of your portfolios.
- Hit the ?End? key to go to the bottom of the screen, and hit ?Page up.?? You will see a little link on the left labeled ?more News? with a caret pointing downward.? If you to go further back in time, click the link.? If you want still more news, just keep repeating ?End, Page Up, Click? until you cover the whole time you want news for.
- Hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C to copy the whole browser window
- Ctrl-V to paste into Excel
- Ctrl-F, search for ?day and time?
- Using Shift, press Page Down to highlight all of the stories, Ctrl-C to copy
- Paste into a new sheet
- Widen Column B a lot, such that the only columns you see are A through D
- Click “Merge and Center” to demerge all cells
- Click on the Sort A-to-Z button
- Open the news screener, hit Ctrl-C to copy
- Flip back to the sheet you had open in step 10, and hit Ctrl-V to paste in Spreadsheet at cell D1
- Make sure to copy down new paste to cover all of your rows, or delete rows for which there is no news.
- Sort on the rightmost column
- Delete all the rows labeled “Here” in the rightmost column
- Delete all of the columns from ?C? to the right.
- Enjoy
- Optional ? With your cursor in cell A1, click the button to create a pivot-table.? Take defaults, hit OK.
- Click and Drag ?day and time? into the row labels, and values
- Then click down arrow next to Row Labels on the pivot table, and choose ?More Sort Options?
- Click Descending (Z to A) and choose ?Count of day and time.?? Click OK, and you are done.
- Really enjoy.
After step 17, you would have something that looks like this:
After step 22, you would have something that looked like this:
| Row Labels | Count of day and time |
| WFC |
153 |
| CVX |
32 |
| INTC |
22 |
| XRX |
20 |
| ORCL |
17 |
| CSCO |
16 |
| BP |
5 |
| VOD |
4 |
| AIZ |
3 |
| TEL |
2 |
| BRK-B |
2 |
| L |
2 |
| VLO |
1 |
| TRV |
1 |
| PSX |
1 |
| ESV |
1 |
| RGA |
1 |
| Grand Total |
283 |
The purpose of creating the pivot table is to highlight stocks with a lot of news.? Stocks with lots of news, you typically know what happened.? I set my limit at 10 stories.? If there are more, I do a quick scan of the companies with a lot of articles and see if it is just one story written many times.? In this case, I deleted the stories from WFC and XRX — there was basically one story for each.? WFC earnings, and XRX’s CFO leaving to go to Apple.
That left me with only 110 articles to look at out of 467 at the start of this exercise.? As it was, I chose to read 10 of the articles.? It takes me 3 minutes to use the news screener (once you get used to it, it is fast), and it saves me tons of time, and helps me be more focused in what I read.
This is my way of wading through too many articles, eliminating robotic, and lower quality content.? Note: if you don’t agree with what I think is low value, you can change the headers in my spreadsheet in columns D through N.
I hope you enjoy this.
Full disclosure: long AIZ, BP, BRK-B, CSCO, CVX, ESV, INTC, L, ORCL, PSX, RGA, TEL, TRV, VLO, VOD, WFC, XRX
I am surprised this post didn’t get more comments / “thank you”s. News overflow (a lot of it low quality) is a huge time waster for many investors — both pro and amateur.
A former colleague wrote some custom software (that he still makes available to people already on his list). His software does everything your spreadsheet does and adds a lot of features like archiving / indexing / cross linking (when you see something in today’s article, you can quickly refer back to older related articles). And it does it automatically throughout the day.
But as a stand alone “free” tool that uses Excel (something most traders have) — your spreadsheet is really cool.
Thanks, Greg. I never know what I am going to get with any post. But surprises can be fun.
How about looking only at the high volume/movement stocks? If the news doesn’t move the stock, it’s probably not important. YHOO doesn’t let you filter by higher than avg volume, but Finviz does. Or you can set up an RSS feed via Google reader and get all the official press releases (I’ve set up about 20 stocks and can go days without anything showing up). Thanks for sharing some of your tips and tricks, but there’s got to be a better way.
I use this to track companies that I own. If there is a lot of movement, I know what happened. What I like are bits of news that get yawned at, that are misunderstood.
Different people will need different tools. Thanks for your comment, it helped.