Hey guys, Doing an independent project for a class that I'm doing away from my normal college curriculum and am looking for some data. Basically I am going to be looking for certain "triggers" and then looking at certain sectors and technicals on those sectors for the day or week after the trigger. I want to backtest strategies, but that isn't completely necessary if it isn't really possible without paying. An example of what I'm talking about would be: Trigger: Weather in Russia is horrible, bad droughts Look-up: Agg commodities See: Wheat limit up multiple days I guess I am probably going to have to look up the triggers manually. The ones I have are weather based, rate differential triggers in currencies, earnings season triggers for equities, inflation as a trigger for investments into commodities(CPI, PPI), relative steepness of the yield curve hitting certain points, and et cetera So basically, any help on finding any of these triggers throughout time, and any help on getting data for certain sectors during/after the event happens? edit: Another example: Say I want aggregate earnings-season data. Something like the data for X sector, and what the companies in the sector did. Then I would want to look at future patterns in the sector and the market as a whole. So for example, look at the Tech sector, see if it outperformed estimates during X year, and then try to get data on stocks and markets in the weeks following those events. Those types of things.
Here's a place you might find some trigger idead. You could look at an extreme value of any of these data series as a trigger. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/
For sector data you can get ETF returns from Yahoo. Or look here for returns to custom sector indexes: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/data_library.html scroll down the page to industry portfolios