It's pretty straight-forward (and basic) for now because I wanted to release the simplest version to see if people use & like it. At the top of that scan's filters you'll see two fields: "Search Term" and "Earliest Publication Date". news_search_fields.png34.25 KBThe scan will look for an exact match for your search term in news headlines (SwingTradeBot does NOT have the contents of news articles, just the headlines). The search will start looking at headlines published on the date you choose in the "Earliest Publication Date" field and will look up to the current date.
You'll see the resulting headlines at the bottom of the page. Here are some results from a "FDA" search: news_search_articles.png62.74 KB The reason I resisted creating this scan for so long is because it comes with a lot of caveats (which I listed in the forum a few weeks ago). Some of those are:
All SwingTradeBot gets is headlines and even then, it's (mostly) only what's available on Yahoo Finance -- so stuff like many upgrades & downgrades are missing.
I only pull news a couple of times per day and it's not practical / feasible to do much more than that, so this isn't a real-time news search
Things may be worded in strange/unexpected ways. For example, an earnings announcement may contain "earnings" or "financials" or "Qx results". So you may have to get creative with your searching
A lot of media outlets like to do clickbait-ish headlines these days, so you often won't see the actual keywords in the headline. Instead of "Company X got FDA approval" the headline might say "Why Company X is soaring today..."
A company might put out a press release weeks ahead of an actual event, so something may not be actionable immediately
For those of you using the Australian & Canadian versions of SwingTradeBot unfortunately they have access to even fewer headlines than the US version does.
Nonetheless, I do think this scan can be useful. There are a couple of searches I've wanted and the scan now allows me to get results quickly. They are:
Stocks with a recent FDA approval (note that I used "FDA" as my search term instead of something like "FDA approval" because the headlines might not exactly match if I use a longer term. Indeed, one of the headlines is "FDA grants PMA approval...")
Stocks with an upcoming or recent secondary offering. Again, I used a shorter search term ('offering' instead of 'secondary offering') to increase my chances of finding headlines that fit my intent but don't have an exact match to 'secondary offering')
In both of those cases I generally won't make a trade on the day the news breaks. Rather I like to add those kind of stocks to watchlists and wait for them to give me one of my bread & butter setups (like a Calm After Storm or a Non-ADX Pullback). And in the case of the secondary offerings, I wait until after the offerings are actually priced & completed.
Please let me know in the comments what you think of the scan. And how you are or might use it. There are a couple of things I could do to enhance it but I don't want to put time into these things if nobody is going to make use of them:
Smarter / more complicated search terms. So being able to do something like finding headlines with all of a list of words (one AND two AND three) or any of a list of words (one OR two OR three).
Making it so you can choose to include the news search in a Combo Scan. Then, for example, you could scan for stocks with an Expansion Breakout plus whatever headlines you care about.
