Economic News Release Access from API?

I’m going to write a program to execute orders through my broker’s API. No issues on that end. My problem is with getting the news information.

I called Reuters and they acted like they never heard of an API. Even their technical department was playing dumb.
I looked at a couple other news providers’ websites but seems like people do not want to provide this service.

The issues of this project seem large to me if a news provider does not have a client which opens up their news to an API.

Right now I'm thinking of creating a sniffer and a news provider that transfers in plain text. I'll then capture the data as it goes through my network card, reassemble it and try and parse the released economic number via regular expressions.

If anyone knows of a company that provides news with an API or an all around easier way of doing this I'd be grateful.

 

Reuters has something but I'm unsure it's what you are looking for:

December 11, 2006
From Reuters, Automatic Trading Linked to News Events
By JEREMY W. PETERS
The news can be pretty hard on stock prices.
Announcements about corporate profits (or lack thereof), a change in management, rumors of a merger, even the weather. All these events can cause a company’s share price to move wildly up or down.
Today, the Reuters Group begins selling two trading services that allow subscribers to set up automatic trading orders based on the news. They will give subscribers the ability to mine past and present Reuters news articles in real time and automatically buy, sell or hold a stock based on market-moving events.
The mining and sifting of news take place in computers dedicated to algorithmic trading; that is, automatic buying and selling based on complex mathematical formulas that aim to pick the optimal time to trade a stock.
Although algorithmic trading on news events already exists, Reuters says its system is the most advanced. “If an event breaks somewhere in the world, you want to be able to respond to that, or manage the event risks,” said Richard W. Brown, business manager for Reuters NewsScope, as the new program is being called. “At a very simplistic level it’s about speed.”
The price for the services will vary based on how investors use them, starting at several thousand dollars a month, Reuters said.
Hypothetically, trading with Reuters NewsScope would work something like this:
Investors trading shares of Ford Motor know there are certain events that cause the share price to rise or fall — sudden changes in gasoline prices, a labor strike at a parts supplier, a poor month for automobile sales, for example. Reuters NewsScope will allow investors to fine-tune their computers to scan live news feeds of Reuters coverage and watch for items affecting Ford.
Then, through a separate NewsScope program, traders could further adjust trading parameters by scanning Reuters news archives for articles about past announcements from Ford. The database allows traders to analyze how a company’s stock performed after those announcements and to look at the price and volume of shares traded. Investors would program their computers to buy or sell stock automatically based on historical patterns.
Algorithmic trading, also known as programmed trading, is not a new phenomenon, but it is increasing in popularity. A third of all stock trades in the United States were driven by automatic algorithms last year, some studies estimate.
The Reuters software will give large investors like hedge funds, which use algorithmic trading most frequently, another tool in the hypercompetitive world of institutional investing. John Bates, who developed algorithmic trading software for his company Apama Products, a division of Progress Software, said that as trading technology improves, investors not using the latest software could put their business at risk.
“We’re talking about milliseconds,” Mr. Bates said. “The latency between receiving data in, making a decision that a rule has been met and placing an order, should be milliseconds.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/t...6eb2a96222ed46&ex=1167022800&pagewanted=print

 

The woman I spoke to mentioned this and said it cost "tens of thousands of dollars" per month. Even if I could afford it I hard a hard time buying signals. Especially from someone as big as Reuters.

 

You can access news via the TAL API for RealTick.

You might want to review their site: https://toolkit.taltrade.com/

 

Thanks. I will check it out. How is RealTick for news?

I'm interested in accessing mainly the projected number deviations of CPI, Non-Farm etc. I imagine parsing these numbers from the current, projected and previous is going to be a pain but I know people do it.

 

bloomberg can be jerry-rigged, bloomberg terminal. You need to find a programmer who will do it for you.

 

If it requires using a debugger and knowing assembly I don't think it is for me. I hope the be the programmer who does this project so I'm trying to figure out what will work for sure before I commit to a subscription.

 

Have you done a survey on how many times the market your looking to trade through, moves or gaps up or down based on above expectations or below expectations of the economic news event?

From a gross point of view, this methodology would make sense, but there are a lot of news traders, and the market reaction can be confounding.

The market does what it wants regardless of the news. Eventually most everyone comes to realize this point, in their speculative endevours.

If you look at the price battle that occurs, market participants jockey for control of the price post news. Eventually through submission, a winner emerges, then price trends till it sucks in enough people with the trend, and those same market participants will reverse the price in the other direction shaking off the session buy n holders.

This happened in GBPUSD early Friday(4 AM) after GBP retail sales and about 10 AM EST USA when USD consumer confidence came out.

When a runaway session occurs, these are the times, when it becomes fruitful.

Also having fills at desired levels during a news event becomes problematic. Your basically giving your broker a license to steal.

 

Spectre,

I won't be the first person putting my money on the line to trade through this but according to one individual who trades currency futures, they provide much better fills compared to FX and it is a profitable strategy.

 

There is more regulatory control, on the exchanges, and tick data continuity is sought faster, meaning once the news comes out and for a minute or so, the price can vary but after that abberant fills are looked into. Between the floor brokers and floor traders/scalpers. The exchanges have a vested interest in preserving the exchanges integrity.

The reaction after news is not always as expected. On the whole it approaches 60%.