Using financial news releases to trade stocks?
In the U.S., publicly traded companies are under the rules of Regulation Fair Disclosure, which says that a company must release information to all investors at the same time.  The company website and social media both count as fair disclosure, because every investor has access to those outlets, but a press release newswire service could also be the first outlet.  (What is forbidden by this regulation is the practice of releasing news first to the brokers, who could inform certain customers of the news early.) I think that the first outlet for press releases could be different for each company, depending on the internal procedures of the company.  Some would update their website first, and others would wait to update the site until the press release hits the newswire first. Yes, there are very lucrative opportunities available by using financial news releases. A lot of times other people just aren't looking in less popular markets, or you may observe the news source before other people realize it, or may interpret the news differently than the other market participants. There is also the buy the rumor, sell the news mantra - for positive expected information (opposite for negative expected news), which results in a counterintuitive trading pattern. No matter how a company releases relevant information about their business, SOMEBODY will be the first to see it. I mean, of all the people looking, someone has to be the first. I presume that professional stock brokers have their eyes on these things closely and know exactly who publishes where and when to expect new information. In real life, many brokers are going to be seeing this information within seconds of each other. I suppose if one sees it half a second before everybody else, knows what he's looking for and has already decided what he's going to do based on this information, he might get a buy or sell order in before anybody else. Odds are that if you're not a professional broker, you don't know when to expect new information to be posted, and you probably have a job or a family or like to eat and sleep now and then, so you can't be watching somebody's web site constantly, so you'll be lagging hours or days behind the full-time professionals.
Hey so I'm completely new to anything financial. Have a bad habit of burning thru my money and would prefer to learn ways to make a little instead. What are some good tools that I could use to learn how to trade stocks or the best ways to get started investing? Thank you "The fallacy in your question is in this statement: ""The formulas must exist, because prices can be followed real time."" What you see are snapshots of the current status of the stock, what was the last price a stock was traded at, what is the volume, is the price going up or down.  People who buy and hold their stock look at the status every few days or even every few months. Day traders look at the status every second of the trading day.  The math/formula comes in when people try to predict where the stock is going based on the squiggles in the line. These squiggles move based on how other people react to the squiggles.  The big movements occur when big pieces of news make large movements in the price. Company X announces the release of the key product will be delayed by a year; the founder is stepping down; the government just doubled the order for a new weapon system; the insiders are selling all the shares they can. There are no formulas to determine the correct price, only formulas that try to predict where the price may go." How long is a piece of string?  This will depend on many variables. How many trades will you make in a day? What income would you be expecting to make? What expectancy do you need to achieve? Which markets you will choose to trade?  Your first step should be to develop a Trading Plan, then develop your trading rules and your risk management. Then you should back test your strategy and then use a virtual account to practice losing on. Because one thing you will get is many losses. You have to learn to take a loss when the market moves against you. And you need to let your profits run and keep your losses small. A good book to start with is Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom by Van Tharp. It will teach you about Expectancy, Money Management, Risk Management and the Phycology of Trading. Two thing I can recommend are: 1) to look into position and trend trading and other types of short term trading instead of day trading. You would usually place your trades after market close together with your stops and avoid being in front of the screen all day trying to chase the market. You need to take your emotion out of your trading if you want to succeed; 2) don't trade penny stocks, trade commodities, FX or standard stocks, but keep away from penny stocks. Just because you can buy them for a penny does not mean they are cheap. In 1997, the late David Bowie famously worked with a financier to innovate on a bond issue to be paid back by the royalties on his back catalog, Bowie Bonds  Several contemporary musicians followed suit, but Madonna was not one of them.  At some point this may change and Madonna or the label that owns part of the catalog may issue bonds backed by royalties.   Madonna's catalog pre-2007 is owned by Warner Music which in 2011 was sold by Time-Warner to a private equity company Access Industries.   Madonna's post 2007 music including the latest 2015 release is in partnership with LiveNation, a publicly traded company LYV. "Considering the fact that you are so unaware of how to find such data, I find it very very hard to believe that you actually need it. ""All trade and finance data for as much tickers and markets as possible."" Wtf does that even mean. You could be referencing thousands of different types of data for any given ""ticker"" with a statement so vague. What are you looking for?" Thanks for your reply. I’m not familiar with the term “Held-For-Trading Security”. My securities are generally held as collateral against my shorts. To clarify, I am just trying to track the “money in” and “money out” entries in my account for the shorts I write. The transaction is relatively straight forward, except there is a ton of information attached! In simple terms, for the ticker CSR and short contract CSRUQ8, the relevant entries look something like this: There are no entries for expiries. I need to ensure that funds are available for future margin calls and assignments. The sale side using covered calls is as involved. SE:Personal Finance user Ray K says in a comment on this question that his or her broker said: a company cannot release any significant news in a share-holder meeting that is not publicly accessible / open, similar to how earnings releases are available to the entire public at the same time, not just to a few attending a meeting. "I am strongly skeptical of this.  In fact, after reading your question, I did the following: I wrote a little program in python that ""simulates"" a stock by flipping a coin. Each time the coin comes up heads, the stock's value grows by 1. Each time the coin comes up tails, the stock's value drops by 1.  I then group, say, 50 of these steps into a ""day"", and for each day I look at opening, closing, maximum and minimum. This is then graphed in a candlestick chart.  Funny enough, those things look exactly like the charts analysts look at. Here are a few examples:    If you want to be a troll, show these to a technical analyst and ask them which of these stocks you should sell short and which of them you should buy. You can try this at home, I posted the code here and it only needs Python with a few extra packages (Numpy and Pylab, should both be in the SciPy package). In reply to a comment from JoeTaxpayer, let me add some more theory to this. My code actually performs a one-dimensional random walk. Now Joe in the comments says that an infinite number of flips should approach the zero line, but that is not exactly correct. In fact, there is a high chance to end up far from the zero line, because the expected distance from the start for a random walk with N steps is sqrt(N).  What does indeed approach the zero line is if you took a bunch of these random walks and then performed the average over those. There is, however, one important aspect in which this random walk differs from the stock market: The random walk can go down as far as it likes, whereas a stock has a bottom below which it cannot fall. Reaching this bottom means the company is bankrupt and gets removed from the market. This means that the total stock market, which we might interpret as a sum of random walks, does indeed have a bias towards upwards movement, since I'm only averaging over those random walks that don't go below a certain threshold. But you can really only benefit from this effect by being broadly diversified."