Trading can be stressful let alone choosing a reliable news feed to fit your needs as a trader. There are so many platforms out there to choose from it can be hard to determine which one will suit your needs. As a trader, it’s always important to consider your trading strategy when looking at different platforms. Some platforms offer more than you need or not as much as you need. In this blog post, we’ll review the most important things to keep in mind when searching for the best stock news feed for day trading.
Why Use Stock News for Day Trading
Trading the news can be important, and even riskier due to breaking news being very influential on the stock market. However, there’s a lot of money to be made with breaking news. Keep in mind, when trading new catalysts, you’re not trading based on when the event happened but the anticipation of the certain news breaking. Supply and demand are very sensitive to the news, the anticipation of news breaking can make people buy a stock or sell immediately.
How to Anticipate the News
- Government Reports: These can allow insight into how strong or weak consumer spending is and how the overall economy is performing. Financial reports, like those reported through the SEC, can also be helpful in determining a majority of things. Check out our blog post for different SEC filings you can use to your advantage when trading the news.
- Industry News: It may also be helpful to keep an eye on what industries are booming or what consumers are starting to use daily. Stay updated on what trends are up and coming and which ones are dying. Social media platforms can be a helpful tool to track these trends.
- Bad News Vs. Good News: Not all bad news is completely negative on a stock. In certain instances, take for example tech stocks, that rose during the pandemic.
Stock News Feed for Day Trading: Points of Consideration
- Price: Depending on how often you trade you’ll want to weigh out the different prices of the options out there. Many platforms offer free options that come with less advanced tools. For example, if you’re trading the news consistently having something like an alert system like Squawk, may be more beneficial. However, free options can sometimes have laggy alerts, and those few seconds can be the difference between making profits or large losses.
Sometimes social media accounts, specifically Twitter newsfeeds and following credible professional traders, may be all you need. Watching the news this way can help you anticipate and determine upcoming trends in the consumer space.
When you begin to become more comfortable with trading and have familiarized yourself with the different ways to trade news you’ll want to consider using more advanced newsfeed platforms.
Many advanced newsfeed platforms, like Benzinga Pro, offer a multitude of different tools to better help you assess the current market. These advanced tools can give you a better advantage and understanding of how to make better trades compared to other traders using free options of newsfeed platforms.
- Support: Live support may be something you want when trading the news. Sometimes a platform may crash or maybe you’re confused about a report you’re reading. Some platforms offer chat rooms that enable other users to help solve issues, or live help desks may be available.
- Speed of News: Depending on your trading strategy you may need fast, reliable news, that isn’t laggy. Free platforms and social media accounts can be buggy and have a ton of noise unrelated to what you’re actually trying to trade. Sometimes platforms are just not as updated as others and their news sources may be lagging behind others.
- Type of news: Again, this is dependent on your trading strategy you prefer. However, there are different types of news you may want to keep track of.
- Unexpected News: These can be things like natural disasters. Anything that may affect the market without anticipation for it.
- Recurring News: This is more of your daily news, or news that may occur at the same time like earnings or economic reports.
- Depending on what you want to trade some platforms may only offer one or the other, or specific types of news, such as crypto or equities focused.
Why Use Benzinga Pro for News Trading
One of the best things about using the Benzinga Pro stock news feed for day trading is the free two-week trial offered. This allows you to test out the waters to see if Benzinga Pro is the right fit for your trading strategy.
Benzinga Pro offers two different subscription options: Basic and Essential.
The Basic plan offers a Watchlist, which you can use to filter tools inside Benzinga Pro. The Details tool gives you what you need to analyze key statistics. However, the Basic plan has delayed quotes and does not have access to Squawk.
The Essential plan offers full Newsfeed access and Nasdaq Basic Real-Time Quotes, along with all the other basic features. It also includes live chat with our Newsdesk, sentiment indicators, and Signals.
Another great aspect of this feature is that Benzinga Pro’s platform has a “Why is it Moving” feature with a description to allow you to better understand why certain news is moving markets. You can utilize the Newsdesk to get an even better understanding as to why certain things are moving.
Another great tool offered with the Essential plan is the usage of sentiment indicators. Our Newsdesk analysts will give ratings to news items based on how likely they think the news is to impact stock movement.
Squawk
Benzinga Pro also offers an Audio Squawk. This tool is great for those reacting to fast market news. The best part about this feature is that you can have it in the background of your desktop so that it isn’t clouding up any of your charts or other tools necessary for trading.
Movers
The Movers tool is a useful tool in Benzinga Pro because of how customizable it is. The Movers tool allows you to see the biggest gainers and losers, gainers, or just losers. This also suits all different types of trading strategies because you can change the session to view pre-market and after hours, as well as personalize it to different periods like 15 minutes to an hour. You can also customize it to fit different market caps. The Movers tool is great for researching things moving the market and customizing it to fit your trading style.
Learn how easy it is to set up your specific settings in this easy-to-follow tutorial.
Calendar
The Calendar Tool is yet another advantageous feature in pro that allows you to view an array of economic data from analyst ratings to retail sales. The Benzinga Pro Calendar tool allows you to view calendars such as Earnings Calendars, Analyst Ratings Calendars, Economic Calendars, and Unusual Options Activity Calendar. This type of data is useful for keeping track of past and future events.
Learn how to set up the Calendar Tool and more in this blog post!
Signals
Another customizable tool offered through Benzinga Pro is the Signals Tool. If you’re interested in staying alerted on price or volume swings, you’ll definitely want to check out the Signals Tool. The Signals Tool alerts you to:
- Price Spikes
- Options Activity
- Block Trade
- Halt/Resume
- Opening Gaps
- Highs
- Lows
The best feature about this tool is you can filter it to Signal you on things like your Watchlist. The Signals Tool is so helpful because you can be alerted on specific news you’ve been watching from your customized Watchlist. So, you can tailor this tool to however your trading strategy changes.
If you’re curious about how easy it is to customize this tool to fit your trading plan read this blog.
Final Thoughts
Overall, there are many great paid options and free options that will assist you as a trader. The most important thing when reviewing different news feeds is to make sure that it will be advantageous to your trading style. So, keep in mind the goals for your trading and what you need to help you succeed as a trader.
Try Benzinga Pro free for two weeks, no credit card required, and see how Benzinga Pro can be the best newsfeed trading platform for you.
Disclaimer: Benzinga is a news organization and does not provide financial advice and does not issue stock recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Benzinga Pro is for informational purposes and should not be viewed as recommendations. Benzinga Pro will never tell you whether to buy or sell a stock. It will only inform your trading decisions. You can find our full disclaimer located here.