If day trading has recently sparked your curiosity, you probably know that stock market news is an important part of your toolkit.
News is a big catalyst in the market and can cause quick volatility in stock that creates opportunities for traders to make a profit.
But how do you filter through stock market news?
That’s where keywords and filtering comes into play. If you’ve subscribed to a stock news service like Benzinga Pro, then you likely have the tools at your disposal to sort out the noise.
This blog will take you through the different ways you can filter stock market news so you know what to pay attention to.
Why Stock Market News Is Important
We’ve already briefly mentioned it, but stock market news is crucial because it can cause volatility in stocks—exactly what you want to capture as a day trader. Whether it’s expected news—such as earnings reports—or unexpected, you can potentially take advantage of that news.
News like mergers, clinical trials, certain SEC filings, and earnings can all play a role in causing volatility. Additionally, stock news can affect an entire sector, such as retail, or competitors, such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
Go Deeper: Why Traders Need Stock Market News
Where do I Begin with Stock Market News?
There’s a lot of news out there. Looking at your newsfeed, it can be overwhelming with all the information provided.
So how do you start? Start filtering the news.
First, think about your trading strategy. Do you trade a specific sector? Do you look for a particular price or market cap? Maybe, you are looking for low float stocks. Whatever your trading strategy is, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to trade so you can filter the news to your needs.
If you don’t have a clear trading strategy yet, make sure you do research to create one. Check out some common recommendations for trading, such as trading what you know. For example, if you live in a farming or rural community, maybe you focus on agriculture stocks. If you have a tech or medical background, you may choose to focus on that sector.
Filter the News
Once you have your trading strategy in place, you’ll want to filter your news. For this blog post, we’ll use Benzinga Pro as an example.
Sources
Sources are one of the most important filters you need to consider when you’re filtering the news, because they determine what you do and don’t see.
For Benzinga Pro, the main newswire is Benzinga Wire. Benzinga Signals is also popular because it highlights activity like option trades and trading halts.
Press Releases give you a continuous stream of all the press releases from companies via our partner distributors. You can also filter this further by press release distributor to filter the noise.
The SEC source—you guessed it—gives you a feed of SEC filings.
If you’re looking for news out of Asia, then you might want a news source like Jiji Press.
For Benzinga Pro, Partner Links will share news from our partners such as Reuters, Seeking Alpha and many more.
The more news sources you select, the more news you’re going to get. And on the flip side, the fewer sources, the less news you’ll get. Luckily, no matter what sources you choose, you can continue to filter the news even further to get a curated feed of news.
Categories and Sectors
Next, you’re going to want to filter by categories and sectors. Within some of the categories, such as analyst ratings, there are subcategories you can select. This works the same way with the sector filters, as well.
You can select as many or as few as you would like.
Watchlists
If you want to get even more filtered, you can create watchlists and filter the Newsfeed to only get news pertaining to a certain list of stocks.
Keywords
Keywords are the key to filtering your Newsfeed. In the search bar, you can search for any term and hit enter to see the results. Keywords can be stocks, SEC forms, people, and more. Below is a list of common keywords that can help you find volatility.
Other Tips for Stock Market News Filtering
There are a few other tips you can use to filter stock market news.
You can download a highlighting tool browser extension. These tools allow you to choose certain words or phrases that you want to automatically highlight on your screen. So if you’re looking for news on clinical trials, you could set the keywords into the tool so those words stand out on your screen.
Check out our video on setting up your highlight tool here.
One other tip to make sure you don’t miss out on key headlines–especially if you’re heavily filtering your Newsfeed—is to listen to an audio Squawk. Squawks are audio broadcasts where the Squawker reads key headlines, economic data/reports and market-moving news.
Final Thoughts
Filtering the news can seem overwhelming, but when using a tool like Benzinga Pro, it makes it easy to filter through the noise. To recap, this is one approach to filtering through stock market news:
- Determine your trading strategy
- Choose your stock market news sources
- Filter for categories and sectors
- Create watchlists to filter for certain stocks
- Use keywords
If you’d like to try out Benzinga Pro to filter through the noise, start your free, two-week trial by clicking here (no credit card required to join!).
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.