How Can Web Scraping Technology Help the Finance Industry?

How Can Web Scraping Technology Help the Finance Industry?
Posted
Feb 16, 2022

Economic data drives most important decisions in the financial market, from choosing which stocks to buy and sell to deciding on the next investment opportunity. The challenge when dealing with financial data is both organizing and processing.

However, all problems are solved easily with web scraping. It is important to accurately implement the collection of financial data, which is a necessary commodity when analyzing the market or trading on the stock exchange. This helps in making crucial solutions on a daily basis.

What is Web Scraping in Finance?

It is estimated that financial and market research gets the highest return on investment in web data. Financial data is content that can provide a wealth of information for investing and trading. Trading prices and changes in securities, mutual funds, futures, cryptocurrencies, financial reports, press releases, and other business-related news are rich sources of financial data applicable for various purposes.

What data can be collected:

  • Financial industry data
  • Stock market data
  • Company data
  • Newspaper data
  • Alternative data
  • Investment data
  • Competitors' data

Web scraping automates the extraction and aggregation of financial data, makes it easier to find stocks, and allows you to predict the market based on the information.

Read more about Web Scraping: What is Web Scraping and What is it Used For?

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Why Is Web Scraping Important in Finance?

With web scraping technology in finance, you can quickly analyze and retrieve data from the Internet. You no longer have to fill out huge application forms, upload any documents, visit the bank in person to verify or collect information manually. Web scraping helps people to analyze and access data that would otherwise be inaccessible. Any data that enables better business and marketing strategies is a great experience.

Therefore, the financial sector relies heavily on web scraping to optimize its strategies by analyzing the current state of the financial market, identifying market changes and trends, monitoring national and global news, and assessing consumer sentiment and behavior.

Web scraping is also one of the most important sources of information for asset managers on market trends and investment opportunities.

Application of Web Data Scraping for Finance

Application of Web Data Scraping for Finance

Automated data extraction in the financial industry reduces the time for market analysis and increases the scope of reporting. Here are some of the standard applications of financial data scraping:

Product Data

Collecting commodity data provides insights into a number of factors that are relevant to assessing company fundamentals and stock performance. This kind of data opens up advantageous opportunities for investors in determining market orders and positions, as well as providing insight into long-term trends.

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SEC Filing Data

By gathering information from SEC filings, investors get high-quality, reliable information that meets the U.S. government's strict standards, uncovering valuable alpha information to find new investment opportunities.

Product Reviews

Product reviews can allow investors to actively gather information about the life cycle of a product, make more relevant assumptions about a company's earnings, and predict how a company's stock will behave.

Company News

With web scraping, you can find out how often a company is mentioned on social media and by business content providers, which helps in building successful company development strategies. This type of data can, for example, provide a record of major news events when transactions are made.

Equity Research

Equity research is the process of collecting and analyzing data about a business or company to make decisions about investing in their stock and to study the most important industry events. Web scrapers collect data on market prices, inventories, customer portfolios, product data, company news, etc. to use to identify market trends, monitor prices, and inventories or for analysis that can lead to major investments.

Venture Capital

Venture capitalists can use web scraping to create lists of startups or small businesses and gather data on their funding or investments by large companies from sites such as TechCrunch or CrunchBase. This data can help track market trends, technology and portfolio companies, discover industry niches and identify investment opportunities.

Risk Compliance

Compliance is important for all companies, particularly those in the financial sector. Government and news sites are critical information sources about financial regulations and changes. Extracted data from government and news resources allow financial institutions to build a very detailed knowledge base of regulations and policy changes to ensure compliance and respond quickly to changes.

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Financial Ratings

Many financial institutions, including rating agents, use web scraping to create a working database from thousands of corporate websites. Such information is valuable to clients in the investment sector, banks, etc. They can then make informed decisions based on their observations.

Market Sentiment Analysis

All relevant financial market news can be obtained from discussion forums, social networking sites, blogs, comments and reviews. This is how financial institutions can conduct sentiment analysis to catch people's attitudes about the market and learn market trends.

Web Scraping in Hedge Funds

Hedge funds are investments that carry some risk in the return on investment. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on data to account for the nature of volatility in the hedge fund market. Web scraping can provide information covering aspects such as market strength, consumer behavior, competitive intelligence, etc., which facilitates the strategic decision-making process. A huge part of web scraping depends on the effectiveness of the financial structure and the identification of the right data sets by data analysts and portfolio managers.

Using the information allows hedge fund managers to gain insights to make profitable investment decisions, and investment firms use the integration of Web data to aggregate news articles from the Web for analysis. They then use this data and feed it into their machine learning algorithms to make decisions and develop investment strategies.

Investors also use web scraping to quickly analyze millions of tweets to determine which stocks to buy and sell. For example, a tweet by investor and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer praising Twitter's innovations in 2015 led to a 5 percent rise in Twitter stock.

What Are the Best Web Sources for Finding Financial Data?

What Are the Best Web Sources for Finding Financial Data?

Each financial section can use different sources to get the data that suits its purposes. The three main sources for financial analysis are the company's balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.

  1. The balance sheet reflects the financial and physical resources that a company has at its disposal. The balance sheet will be more useful for analyzing a company's current financial position than its expected performance.
  2. The income statement provides information about a company's performance over some time and indicates its future viability.
  3. A cash flow statement reflects a company's performance over a while. Cash flow statements show how companies handle the management of cash inflows and outflows.

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Quarterly or annual reports can be found publicly available online, mostly in PDF. Our scrapers can gather data even from these formats.

However, to get an overview of the financial market and investment opportunities, you can also use sites that help you quickly read the key daily news or stock tracking so you're always up-to-date, such as:

Read more about Web Scraping: How to Generate Business Leads Using Web Scraping

Conclusion

In today's marketplace, the Internet has all the data it needs. Financial institutions use web scraping services to conduct more thorough research on companies before investing in them, thereby reducing risk, decreasing the likelihood of investment losses, and increasing returns. Banks have a better understanding of the "Know Your Customer" concept, are aware of the cost structure of financial services, and can make better offers to the customer.

With the right tools, you can get the financial data you need to stay ahead of the curve. You can always contact us and get answers to all your questions.

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How does it Work?

1. Make a request

You tell us which website(s) to scrape, what data to capture, how often to repeat etc.

2. Analysis

An expert analyzes the specs and proposes a lowest cost solution that fits your budget.

3. Work in progress

We configure, deploy and maintain jobs in our cloud to extract data with highest quality. Then we sample the data and send it to you for review.

4. You check the sample

If you are satisfied with the quality of the dataset sample, we finish the data collection and send you the final result.

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