If you are looking to scrape financial data of thousands of companies across the world, there is no question of doing it manually or with a simple DIY tool. Analysts, Portfolio managers, and Traders working in the financial industry are spending huge amounts of money to gain access to data that could potentially move the market. Getting hold of financial data doesn’t have to be so expensive and time consuming. With PromptCloud’s web crawling services, scraping financial data from publicly available sources on the web is fast, efficient, and easy. Here are some of the use cases that we have encountered from our clients’ request to scrape financial data.
Applications of financial data
1. Financial data and rating services
Our crawlers can be used for monitoring several websites to keep track of financial news. With this in place, changes in the financial state of corporations that can potentially impact the market can be detected in near real time.
2. Financial advisory
If you are looking to build a financial recommendation platform, using web crawling to fetch the needed data would be the ideal option. For example, you could scrape the interest rate for various products on bank websites to recommend the relevant ones to your consumers.
3. Risk mitigation services
Web crawling can be used to extract content from the sites of regulatory bodies (government, court, etc.) to mitigate the risk of lending in case of natural disasters, crimes (example: identity theft) and policy changes.
4. Investment firms
Making safe investments is the key to survival as an investment firm. Scraping financial data can aid you in detecting micro-trends for making such efficient investments and in share trading. The financial performance data needed for this can be scraped from sites like Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Bloomberg market etc.
5. Compliance management
Staying compliant to the policies and regulations set by financial regulators is important if you want to keep your business out of legal troubles and ramifications. You can use web crawling to stay updated to the changing policies and laws to avoid possible consequences.
The requirements
To get started, all you need to do is let us know about your requirement like sources, frequency, data points and the delivery format and method. With this information, our team will do a feasibility check to make sure your requirement is legally and technically feasible. With our fully managed web crawling service, you don’t need to be involved in any of the technical aspects. Common data points associated with stock market data are:
Previous Close
Open
Bid, Ask
Day’s Range
Average Volume
Market Cap
Beta
PE Ratio
EPS
Earning’s Date
Dividend & Yield
Ex-Dividend Date
Crawler setup for scraping financial data
Once the feasibility check is completed and the requirement is found feasible, our team will proceed onto the next step – crawler setup. Setting up the crawler is the most complicated and technically demanding process in web crawling. This will be taken care of by our dedicated technical team and typically takes a few days to get completed. The data starts flowing in after the crawler is set up and running. This initial data might contain noise, which includes unwanted HTML tags and text that got scraped along with the data. To remove this, the data dump file is run through a cleansing setup. Finally, the data is properly structured to ensure compatibility with databases and analytics systems.
Data delivery
The data delivery formats and methods are just as customizable as our crawling solution. You can choose between XML, JSON and CSV for data formats and get the data via our API, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Box or FTP.