Real-Time Stock Market News Monitoring for Key Events

In financial markets, information is currency. A few minutes can make the difference between a profitable trade and a missed opportunity. Institutional traders use sophisticated systems to monitor news feeds for market-moving events, but this technology has historically been complex and expensive.

With Supacrawler’s Watch API, you can build your own powerful, real-time news monitoring system. By watching major financial news outlets for specific keywords, you can receive instant alerts about earnings reports, mergers, acquisitions, and other critical events, allowing you to act on information faster than the average retail trader.

This advanced tutorial will show you how to set up a watch job to monitor headlines on a major financial news website.

Goal

To create an automated, high-frequency watch job that monitors the headlines on a financial news site and sends an alert when new headlines appear, which can then be processed for specific keywords.

curl -X POST https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://www.reuters.com/markets/",
    "frequency": "hourly",
    "selector": "a[data-testid=Heading]",
    "notify_email": "[email protected]",
    "notification_preference": "changes_only"
  }'

How This Forms a Trading Strategy

1. The Trigger: The Supacrawler Watch API acts as the trigger. By monitoring the container for news headlines (a[data-testid=Heading] on Reuters), the job detects when the list of headlines changes (i.e., a new story is published).
2. Frequency: For financial news, a high frequency like hourly is essential to ensure you get alerts close to real-time.
3. The Action (Your System): The email notification is just the beginning. For a true trading strategy, you would use a webhook instead of email. Your own application would receive a payload from Supacrawler the moment a change is detected.
4. Keyword Processing: Your application's backend would then parse the content of the notification. It would scan the new headlines for your target keywords (e.g., "acquisition," "merger," "FDA approval," or a specific stock ticker like "$TSLA").
5. Execution: If a keyword is found, your system can then execute a predefined action, such as sending a high-priority alert to your phone, logging the event, or even triggering an automated trade via a brokerage API.

Building an Advanced Monitoring System

To build a robust system, you should monitor multiple high-impact financial news sources simultaneously. Create a separate watch job for each one.

# Monitors the headlines on Bloomberg's market page
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/markets",
        "frequency": "hourly",
        "selector": "a.single-story-module__headline-link",
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

# Monitors the main headline on MarketWatch
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://www.marketwatch.com/",
        "frequency": "hourly",
        "selector": ".article__headline",
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

From Alert to Action: Next Steps

Once you have your keyword detection in place, you can extend your system even further:

• Sentiment Analysis: Pipe the headline or article summary into a sentiment analysis model. Is the news positive, negative, or neutral? This can add another layer of data to your trading decisions.
• Historical Analysis: Log every detected event. Over time, you can analyze how certain keywords from specific sources correlate with market movements.
• Multi-Factor Alerts: Create more complex rules, such as only alerting you if the same news (e.g., an acquisition target) is reported on two or more of your monitored sources within the same hour.

By using the Watch API as the core detection engine, you can build a sophisticated, automated trading intelligence system that operates 24/7, giving you a powerful edge in the market.