I am astonished by the fact that an old news on bloomberg can push UAL from about 12 to 4 in only four minutes. But bloomberg system doesn't support API for news. Any one know how to read bloomberg headlines into program, then we can analyze and rush to the market at the first second.
Sadly, I do not think this is possible. Even if it could be done, getting the news into a format where a computer could read it and make decisions (buy / sell / etc) is a massive task. Other providers do offer a news-reader API but they tend to be VERY expensive All that said, if you do make any major break-thrus, pls let me know. I would be very intersted. Cheers
Here is some code from my files. It is c# code that might read data from the web. It sounds similar to what you want.
reuters has a program to trade market news into events you can act on - but I've read its $100k to lease
Hedge funds have been doing this for years already. Good luck trying to battle them on technology....
if the news are "plain" economic data releases reading them into a decision box might not be that difficult after all....the box should already have the neural network set up to react in a special manner to the value of the release economic indicator...a decent neural network will pickup the way markets reacted to different economic data in the past and will react accordingly...
programming the neural network to detect significant divergences between the consensus forecast of a given economic release and the actual value released should not be too difficult for an average hedge fund either...
I don't think the logic has to be all that sophisticated to have some value. Just the fact that a company has been mentioned in a headline is useful. I have seen academic papers that use news databases and show stocks with large returns accompanied by a headline react differently than stocks with large returns and no news, I am pretty sure I can find them if anyone cares.