Primer: Stock Market Investor RSS News Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way of distributing content over the internet as "feeds".

What RSS allows stock market investors to do is "subscribe" to specific news feeds related to the stocks they are interested in. With RSS subscriptions you don't have to go looking for the news, instead it's automatically delivered to you as new items are published. This lets you subscribe to multiple feeds on a topic using an RSS reader like Stock Spy. You don't have to visit each site individually which saves you a lot of time.

How do I know if a site offers an RSS feed?

Websites usually will show they have RSS feeds available by placing a small orange icons like these on thier site.

The best thing about RSS for stock market investors is how it integrates with Stock Spy:

  1. You can create volume charts showing the number news items published each trading day. This lets you see when significant news occurs using the news chart's relationship to the price chart.
  2. You can organize multiple feeds grouping by sybmol. Each feed is automatically color coded so it's always easy to see the source of the story.
  3. You can search and filter the feeds using Stock Spy's powerful data mining tools. Each time you chart a feed stock spy shows you all of the relavant financial keywords on the chart when they occured. This is a huge research time saver and allows investors to see relationships and undercurrents which were not possible before

What kind of RSS feeds are available for specific stock symbols?

There are many sources of RSS stock news feeds.

  1. Financial Portals:
    Top financial portals offer the same news you see on their websites through RSS feeds. Some of the financial websites which off RSS feeds for individual stock symbols are Yahoo! Finance, Dow Jones MarketWatch.com, MSN Money Central. Stock Spy automatically sets up feeds for the top stock news portals the first time you chart a stock. This takes the pain out of finding RSS feeds.
  2. Company Investor Relations Websites:
    The company websites are becoming an excellent source of RSS feeds. The investor relations areas of many websites of public companies publish RSS feeds.
    Here are a few examples of investor relations pages which provide RSS feeds: IBM, Aruba Newtorks, Northrop Grumman
  3. Stock Blog Portals:
    You can get symbol specific feeds from AOL's BloggingStocks.com and SeekingAlpha.com. (Also, blog search engines. See "Search Engines" below)
  4. Search Engines :
    Search engines are a powerful tool for creating targeted RSS feeds. Google lets your subscribe to RSS search queries using Google News and Blog search. The Microsoft Live search engine also has similar capability.
  5. Message Boards:
    More and more message boards are offering RSS feeds of the posts made to them. For example you can create subscribe to Yahoo! Finance message boards feed for specific symbols.

I see a lot of general stock market feeds on the net. Are these feeds useful?

The best way to use these feeds is to asociate them with an Index symbol in Stock Spy. For example if you find a feed related to the retail sector you can assign it to the S&P Retail Index using the symbol: ^RLX. These feeds with articles about general trends which relate to entire sectors are great if you invest in ETFs which track an Index.