The stock market plays an important role in the financial world. In essence, it’s a huge database that is updated all the time. Predicting the changes in the stock market is extremely difficult and that’s why it’s important to constantly keep up with all the changes. A single small change in stocks can cost a person a whole business or even more.
A person who’s involved in the financial world can be very vulnerable to any alteration or variations in the stock. However, since the stock market is huge and undergoes changes very fast, it can be almost impossible to keep track of all the current stocks in the market. That’s where data scraping services can help you.
There are numerous sources of financial data that may carry valuable financial information for you and your business, however, trying to manually extract data from these sources can be extremely time consuming and inefficient. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the significance of stock markets and the availability of fresh financial data, and we’ll also reveal how to use the scraped financial data from different sources and why you need it.
A well-functioning stock market is critical for the economic development of the country as it gives many companies the freedom and ability to access capital from the public. In the long term, stock markets aid capital formation and economic growth of the country. Buying stocks provide investors with two major advantages. One advantage is that some stocks pay regular dividends, while another advantage is that investors can make a profit by selling a stock for a higher price than it was purchased.
A major thing to consider here is that investors won’t be able to benefit from the stock market exchange if they do not monitor and update their information regarding the current price of stocks. Having a fresh financial data regarding the stock markets is essential for you if you are trying to make a profit. You need to keep track of the stock price changes and analyze the financial data on a regular basis.
Sources of Financial Data
There are a lot of sources of financial data that carry up-to-date and valuable information regarding the stocks. We will list some of the most reliable ones:
- Yahoo! Finance – one of the biggest and most popular websites, Yahoo Finance provides financial data and news. You can find information like stock quotes, press releases, and financial reports here. It posts original stories by its internal journalists, along with online tools for personal finance management.
- Google Finance – Google Finance was launched by Google back in 2006. After the last website renovation in 2018, the website now contains financial decisions, major financial news events, and stock data with charts.
- Nasdaq Stock Market – Nasdaq is an American stock exchange and is one of the largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization.
- Investopedia – this is a great website especially for the newbies in the industry, who want to get a better understanding of the financial world. Investopedia offers information like term definitions, newsletters, a stock simulator that shows how much investment may earn or lose over time and a lot more. You can find stocks by company name and ticker symbol and get a lot of insights into the company.
- Wall Street Journal – the Wall Street Journal is one of the oldest newspapers and has been a staple for information for investors for decades. The online version today carries a lot of valuable information regarding the financial world and stocks.
- CNNMoney – another online financial news and information source that updates the website data 24 hours, seven days a week. Here you can find all the relevant stock market information.
- MSN Money – MSN Money carries the latest headlines on international economies, money news, personal finance, and the stock market indexes.
This is a very short list of websites that can provide you with valuable financial data regarding the stock markets. These websites carry a lot of information that people can use. However, the amount of the data available is enormous and it can be impossible to manually scrape it.
What Data You Can Get From Financial Sources
Now that we are more familiar with the financial sources, we need to understand what value they can offer in terms of the information they carry. If you are an investor or you work in a financial field, here are some data fields you need to get information about:
- Best Bid/Ask
- 1 Year Target
- Share Volume
- 50 Day Avg. Daily Volume
- Previous Close
- 52 Week High/Low
- Market Cap
- P/E Ratio
- Forward P/E (1y)
- Earnings Per Share (EPS)
- Annualized Dividend
- Ex-Dividend Date
- Dividend Payment Date
- Current Yield
- Beta
- Open Price
- Open Date
- Close Price
- Close Date
Stock markets can offer way more data than the mentioned above fields. But the work with financial data is complicated because it needs a constant update because it’s the most volatile industry out of all. So how to keep up with all that information?
The one and only answer is data crawling. You can use web scraping for-profit purposes and get all your finances to a stable condition. Tracking all the data is the key to success in finances. Web scraping services are a great option for you or your business if you need to get the latest from the financial world. You know the sources from which you can get valuable data and you most surely know all your data needs. So all that is left to you is to find a professional web scraping service company and start working with them on a regular basis.
Why Use Data Scraping Services to Extract Financial Data
In general, web scraping services offer a bunch of advantages over other data extraction methods. Of course, we are talking about big data. Big enough that you can’t simply get what you need by manual extraction. There are also scraping tool that you can use, but they are limited in their ability to crawl and you can’t get exactly the data you need. Web scraping services, on the other hand, are great because they make data scraping fast and easy. Let’s consider just some of the advantages of data scraping services:
Get high-quality financial data from all over the web
You know what data you need, but you can’t have the guarantee that the data you find on the web is authentic and reliable. Professional scraping services will extract data from reliable sources only and will provide you with high-quality data.
Avoid technical issue
The scraping process itself involves a lot of technical details of which you must be aware. Otherwise, the work will be super time-consuming and confusing. However, if you trust the work to people working for a scraping service, you’ll avoid all the confusion and will save lots of time.
No legal violations
Data scraping literally means copying the data available on a website. Of course, if you copy something that does not belong to you, you may find yourself violating some copyrighting laws. A professional web scraping service works in accordance with all the laws and won’t get you into any legal problems.
Concentrate on your main task
The time-consuming data crawling process will distract you from your main job and you will spend most of your time getting the data you need. So why not let people do the work for you so that you can concentrate on your main task. Once you tell a scraping service company you data needs, you won’t need any personal involvement in the scraping process.
Save your time, energy and resources
Work with a scraping service and save your time and energy. Most importantly, save your money and other resources! If you’re someone who needs financial data, that means that you need data on regular basis. So sooner or later you will have to hire a team who would deal with data extraction. Outsourcing the work to a scraping service will be more cost-effective and most importantly, you will be working with a team of professionals and that know what they do.
Who Needs The Web Scraped Financial Data
There are many fields that need financial data and which may use the web-scraped data for their benefit. We’ll consider some of them.
- Investors – if you are an investor or you own an investment firm, then you know that investments are a one-way ticket to either failure or success. There’s no in a middle situation because you either lose or win. It’s extremely important to make a smart and well-thought decision. And the only way to make such a decision is to analyze or the risks.
- Risk analysis firms – a financial risk analyst works closely with data and carefully analyzes the market and the data to help investors or other firms to make risk-free decisions.
- Financial advisory services – advisories make recommendations, so if you want to make a valuable recommendation you need to closely monitor the rates, the markets, financial news and everything else that may concern your clients. Build an advisory platform by collecting the most relevant and reliable data with the help of web scraping services.
- Financial news websites – in order to stay competitive in the news industry, you need to be super fast and deliver fresh news regarding stocks, rates, and news. A great advantage of working with a scraping service is that you can demand data as regularly as you need (i.e. hourly, daily, weekly or monthly). Depending on the financial sector you cover on your website, you can get fresh data on an hourly or daily basis, or even sooner if need be.
If you belong to any of the above-mentioned fields then you most surely need web scraping services!
The Future of Web Scraping in the Stock Market
Web scraping is taking over the world of the stock market as more people increasingly rely on it for data extraction. Investors always want to be ahead of the curve and use web scraping for-profit. If you work in the financial field, you should already understand the importance of data scraping for your profession and what value it may carry to your business. Finance is all about money, trends, and instability. With the help of data, you can easily spot trends and sentiments, which will enable you to invest in time and make a lot of profit. This makes it clear that the use of web scraping in the stock market is already very popular and the more people recognize its value, the more it will be used to get more insights into the stock market.
Web scraping services and data crawling have completely changed the stock market game and created even more opportunities for investors to succeed in the most volatile industry of stock markets.