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Sunday, August 30, 2015

Large Down Mornings in SPY

What has happened in the past when the SPY opens 3.5% or more down?

I ran the numbers and have some code for doing it yourself. I found that there's typically a profitable day ahead, and even if not profitable, the day tends to have enough upside (Open to High) to be of great interest.

 

Here is a link to the code I used to calculate these results. You will want to grab the DataManager from Github to easily populate data for the study.

Check out the topic on the new forum if you have any suggestions or want to discuss the topic in more detail. Or if you just want to talk about your favorite beer :)

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Sunday, August 16, 2015

Downloading Stock Market News for Specific Symbols

Grabbing the data.

How do you grab the latest news on your favorite ticker symbol?

It all starts with the following URL.
https://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=SPY&output=rss
You'll want to change "q=SPY" to whatever symbol you're interested in.

You can add something like the following to the end if you'd like more articles returned. There is, however, a limit on the number returned.
&num=2000
What the returned data means.

When you download the above link, you're given an rss feed, which is in XML. If you don't know XML, it's basically a text document with various fields sorted by tags that look like "<tag>info</tag>" (e.g. <title>SPY Stock News</title>, <link>http://godelsmarket.blogspot.com</link>, etc).

The tags you'll be interested in start with <item>. Each <item> contains info on a single news article. Within the <item></item> tags, you'll find four tags that are probably of interest to you. They are:
<title> This gives you the title of the article. (e.g. <title>S&amp;P 500: Should You Buy the SPY ETF Now?</title>
<link> This gives you the link to the article. (e.g. <link>http://investorplace.com/2015/06/spy-etf-sp-500/</link>
<pubDate> This is the date the article was published online. (e.g. <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2015 12:00:10 GMT</pubDate>) 
<description> This is the description Google gives for the article. It is short but provides an idea without requiring you to download the entire article. (e.g. SPDR S&amp;P 500 ETF Trust Sees Large Drop in Short Interest (SPY))
What you'll likely want to do is download this data and extract it somewhere you can store and analyze it.

Storing the data.

I'd store it in a database. You can also store it in flat files (.txt or .xml) if you prefer.

Create a table in your MySQL database (make sure you have MySQL installed! On Ubuntu Linux: sudo apt-get install msyql-server). This can be modified for other databases fairly easy.
CREATE TABLE stocknews (symbol VARCHAR(5), pubDate DATETIME, title TEXT, link TEXT, description TEXT);
The Code.

Next we want to extract and insert. We'll use Python.

First, if you don't have the "pymysql" module installed you'll need to install it by typing: pip install pymysql. I also really like "timestring" for date/time parsing (run: pip install datestring).

Now for the lovely code :) This can be more easily consumed via the "godelsmarket" Github Repo.

import urllib2
from lxml import etree
import pymysql
import timestring

#connect to the database
connection = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
user='root',
password='password',
db='stock_db')

#stock symbol you want to download news for
symbol = "SPY"

#this is the url where we grab the data
url_stub = "http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?output=rss&q="

#use urllib2 to download the data
response = urllib2.urlopen(url_stub + symbol)
xml = response.read()

#turn into an xml doc
doc = etree.fromstring(xml)
#we're only interested in tags under <item>
item_tags = doc.xpath('//channel/item')
for item in item_tags:
#split up by the four tags
  date_tag = item.xpath('pubDate')
title_tag = item.xpath('title')
link_tag = item.xpath('link')
description_tag = item.xpath('description')

date_text = date_tag[0].text
title_text = title_tag[0].text
link_text = link_tag[0].text
description_text = description_tag[0].text

print 'date:' + date_text
print 'title:' + title_text
print 'link:' + link_text
print 'description:' + description_text

#insert into the database
with connection.cursor() as cursor:
sql = "INSERT INTO `stocknews` (`symbol`, `pubDate`, `title`, `link`, `description`) VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s, %s)"
cursor.execute(sql, (symbol, str(timestring.Date(date_text)), title_text, link_text, description_text))
connection.commit()

As always, if you have any questions feel free to comment! Hope you enjoyed!

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