http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=717225&highlight=pubsub#post717225 Article from Wall Street Journal on this thread about RSS and trading as well as link to software giving EDGAR realtime alerts to RSS.
Take a look at some of these RSS feeds: BARRON'S Monday, August 29, 2005 ELECTRONIC INVESTOR By THERESA W. CAREY, KATHY YAKAL Read All About It As a news junkie, I thought I'd reached Nirvana a couple of years ago when I started playing around with Google news alerts. I happily set up several dozen news alerts, and when one of my search conditions got a hit, I'd get an e-mail with a link to the entire article. Well, Google news alerts are still useful, but they're so 2004. One major drawback is that they depend on you checking -- and reading -- your e-mail to see what's happening. They also poll only a few hundred news sources. What if you've become addicted to a variety of weblogs as well as financial news services? You could easily spend hours every day checking all the sites you've bookmarked. Take it to the next level by setting up your own Really Simple Syndication news aggregator. RSS technology lets you consolidate your favorite online news and Web sources, such as trading and investment sites, newspaper, trade, magazine and corporate sites, as well as blogs and podcasts, into a single aggregated reader. This is done by subscribing to each site's RSS feed. Because RSS feeds deliver information directly to subscribers' desktops -- not via e-mail -- they are secure and spam-proof. Assurance Systems recently reported that 22% of legitimate e-mail does not make it to the intended inbox, and found one Internet-service provider (ISP) that is blocking more than 36% of the opt-in messages, such as Google news alerts, entering its system. As the fight against spam intensifies, these false positives increasingly prevent critical information from reaching consumers. The only way to find them is to wade through your e-mail spam folder, which can be ugly. If you bounce around a Website that includes news, you may see some boxes that say "XML" or "RSS". Those boxes indicate content you can push to your computer using a newsreader, rather than having to find it yourself. If you click on one of those red or blue boxes, however, you'll see a page full of what looks like gobbledygook. Each RSS feed is set up to send out a list of article titles with short synopses. RSS aggregators, or newsreaders, deal with mountains of what appear to be arcane and unreadable pages filled with programming codes, and turn them into easily readable pages full of news headlines. Best of all, you can pick and choose from among the news items available and customize your own financial alerts. The newsreader periodically checks each RSS channel, updates all recently published news and items, and displays the results. When a headline is of interest, you can click it and go directly to the source. One of the easier news-syndication programs available is FeedDemon from Bradbury Software (www.feeddemon.com1, $29.95 to register). The program has hundreds of news feeds built in, which you can customize so you're not faced with stories about Britney Spears when you'd rather be reading about insider trading. FeedDemon's screen has a three-part layout that lets you skim through available articles quickly. On the left, you'll see a list of Channel Groups, such as Business, Entertainment and Technology. Clicking on a group displays all the online publications, Websites and blogs that are available within that channel. Should you click on a particular link, the center pane will display all the headlines available. When you click on a headline, the content of the article is displayed in the right-hand pane. Certain publications will allow only a paragraph or two from the article you want; with a click, you can open a new window that will take you to the originating Website and let you read the article there. FeedDemon also includes a search tool that looks for other news feeds that might interest you. You can try it for free for a limited time. On Alex Barnett's blog, there's a terrific tutorial for using FeedDemon entitled "RSS 101." Check it out at www.extremepodcasting.com/screencasts/usingrss101.htm2. Barnett's screencast, which will run automatically in your browser, describes how to set up an RSS feed very eloquently -- turn up your speakers to hear him chat through the process in his charming British accent. There are quite a few news readers available these days, but most seem to be geared toward the serious propeller-head. Another popular news reader is NewzCrawler (www.newzcrawler.com3), which looks like Microsoft Outlook Express. NewzCrawler lets you subscribe and check for updates on sites that do not (yet) supply their content in syndicated format, such as Barron's Online (www.barrons.com4). This program is not quite as easy to set up and use as FeedDemon, but it does let you view and participate in newsgroups. The most recent version, 1.8 RC2, is much more friendly than the version (1.7) you may find available around the Web, as it includes a tutorial and a Startup Wizard that helps you through the initial configuration. Newz-Crawler carries a registration fee of $25. Recently released in the U.S., NewsInABox (www.newsinabox.com5) has one of the easier methods for adding a newsfeed to your page -- just click on the "XML" or "RSS" box on the Website with the feed you'd like to follow, then drag and drop it onto your NewsInABox page. Adding a feed to most other newsreaders involves, at the very least, copying and pasting a Web address. NewsInABox is $19.95. You don't have to pay to set up your own RSS newsfeeds however. Firefox browser users can integrate RSS feeds, though it's not nearly as easy as using FeedDemon. You can set up a personal "My Yahoo" page, by bringing up www.yahoo.com6 and clicking on "My Yahoo" in the top left corner. This is also somewhat more tedious than FeedDemon, but it's free. Speaking of news for traders and investors, StreetInsider.com (www.streetinsider.com7) recently remodeled its site. The basic content, available for free, offers reports, delayed by one hour, of fundamental events (such as earnings and management changes), as well as rumors, analyst ratings, insider trades, trader talk, mergers and acquisitions, and other items of interest to those in the market. Premium members can get it all in real time, and have it displayed according to the category of the article. Members can receive e-mail alerts on stocks in their portfolio (StreetInsider reports, press releases, SEC filings) and can receive alerts on any of the 20-plus actionable trading categories. You can also view the reports published on StreetInsider in your RSS newsreader. Online Broker Update: Townsend Analytics (www.taltrade.com8) now offers a free RSS feed that alerts interested parties to important information from Townsend Analytics and its RealTick direct-access trading platform (www.realtick.com9). As far as I can tell, it's the first online broker to jump into this arena. MBT Technologies, parent of MB Trading (www.mbtrading.com10), is rolling out its direct-access currency- trading system, featuring its MBTX direct-access smart router. This will allow traders to bypass deal desks and connect directly with electronic liquidity pools and banks. MBT Technologies offers more than 20 currency-trading pairs, such as euro/dollar yen/dollar, British pound/dollar, to name a few. Starting August 30, traders will be able to open accounts for a minimum of $1,000 (it's now $2,000), or sign up for a free live-data demo. http://online.barrons.com/article/SB112482855007920923.html
biggerfish: Now that was some great info. Good information and better still..fast information is a valuable tool. thanks