Copyright © 2013 Gecko Software, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Product: NewsMiner Review
Award of Excellence
Gecko Software, Inc.
271 N. Spring Creek Pkwy. Ste. A
Providence, UT. 84332 USA
Phone:
800-862-7193
Email:
gecko@geckosoftware.com
Website:
www.NewsMiner.Info
Product:
NewsMiner, Software designed to scan and
rank major news networks for top financial stories.
Includes 3D heat maps, charts, and news.
Requirements: WinXP/Vista/7/Mac OSX/Lynix
200 MB free hard disk space, 1024x768 screen
resolution (minimum) Larger recommended.
RAM 2GB (more is better). Requires Internet
connectivity, CPU: 2.4 GHz or higher.
Price: $98.00 includes, Stocks, Futures & Forex, news
scanning and ranking capabilities, with no monthly fee.
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by Kent Kofoed, PitNews Magazine
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The NewsMiner software is a software program that
allows you to "trade the news" by giving you the ability
to mine through breaking news in stocks, futures and
forex, as well as sort through the breaking news utilizing
a range of sorting criteria. The basic concept underlying
the NewsMiner software is that the quicker you are able
to sort through the relevant breaking news and key
information of the markets that you follow, the greater
your information edge will be and, subsequently, the
more informed your trading decisions will likely be.
NewsMiner allows you to quickly dig through breaking
news and key trading information, while avoiding the
market "noise" that is less pertinent to your trading
decisions. After digging through the relevant
information, you will see what topics are being covered
in the news. By default, the software ranks the results in
order of popularity and, in addition, you also have the
option of listing the results by symbol, name, market
(which includes stocks, futures, or forex), or by the
number of articles that have been written recently, about
each specific result. The software allows you to pick
which of the markets you are interested in digging for
news, and you are able to do so, on either an individual
basis or grouped together. In addition to sorting the
news, the software allows you to view the results in a
couple different ways, which is either as a table or as a
packed word cloud (as a quick side note, with the
packed word cloud option you are unable to sort the
results but you are able to pick which asset class you
would like displayed). After you have chosen the assets
from each market that you are interested in, you can
further sort the news by date, either choosing the day's
news or all of the news, and you can then access the
news simply by double-clicking on the article that you
would like to view. The last sorting option that the
software provides is a "heat map" that allows to you
visually sort through the news, making it easy to
recognize what direction the markets, and your search
results, are moving.
One of the main benefits of the NewsMiner software is
that it helps you dig through the news quickly, by
providing standardized screening criteria and letting you
further refine your results by quickly selecting any of
the multiple sorting parameters. To show you how easy
the NewsMiner software is to use, I am going to give an
overview of one of the simulations that I ran when
reviewing the software.
The first selection that I had to make was to decide
which markets I was going to scan for news in. I decided
to scan for news in all three of the market options and,
since all three markets are selected by default, I clicked
the "Dig Now!" button and let the software begin the
digging process. The scan took approximately 50
seconds, which seemed appropriate for the number of
articles that showed up in the results, which was a total
of 688 articles. Since I wanted to view news of assets
from each of the market categories I decided to sort the
results by clicking on the market tab (see Figure 1-1).
There was only one currency pair listed for the forex
market, which was the USD/EUR currency pair, so I
double-clicked the result and added it to the "active"
portfolio (this can also be done by clicking the "Add
Selected to Active" button at the bottom of the results).
Next in line was the futures market, with crude oil
having the highest "popularity" rating, so I double
clicked this result adding it to the "active" portfolio. In
order to round things out a bit, for the futures market
selections, I added the S&P 500 Index and the 10-Year
Treasury as well. The last market was stocks and, in
order to try and produce a variety of results, I decided to
try a couple different selection strategies. I added Apple,
Intel, and Bank of America to my active portfolio since
each of these companies have been in the news quite a
bit recently, in order to see if there was any new market-
moving news that was impacting prices, and I also
added the less-followed (and less frequently traded)
stocks of Conn's, Bio-Rad Laboratories, and Asbury
Automotive Group, in order to see what the market-
moving news was and if the news could potentially be
viewed as a catalyst that could lead to a trend reversal.
Now that I have selected all of the results that I would
like to view breaking news for, I am now in the "Step 2:
Portfolio/Charts!" tab where I can see the chart of each
of my active selections. In addition to the charts of my
selections, the breaking news articles are also listed, on
the right-hand side, with the most recent articles shown
first (see Figure 1-2). Since I have quite a few assets to
go through, I decided to narrow down the results by
clicking the button named "The Days News" instead of
the "All The News!" button. After clicking on the EUR
to USD chart, the related news popped up so I scanned
the headlines to see if there was any breaking news
that was of interest and quickly found an article that
looked like it would cover the information that I was
looking for. I double-clicked the headline and my
browser quickly opened up, and I was brought to the
article, which was written by MarketWatch.com.
After quickly reading the article, and finding what I
was looking for, I moved on to Crude Oil since it has
been rather volatile and all over the news recently, to
see if there was any new information that I wasn't
aware of showing up in the headlines. After a quick
scan, I double-clicked one of the articles and the
Reuters website opened up, along with the article,
which covered the weekly data report from the
American Petroleum Institute. Since I have been
closely following Crude Oil lately I decided to spend
a little more time reading the article, which contained
a significant amount of information ranging from the
API data that was released today to the number of
U.S. crude imports that was released last week. After
I finished up the Crude Oil article I looked at the
next row of charts, which included the heavily-
followed stocks, I noticed that both Intel and Bank of
America closed down today but Apple had closed in
positive territory, so I decided to look at Apple's
news to see what was causing the divergence of its
price action with the market's action. After quickly
scanning through the headlines I noticed that Bio-
Rad Laboratories, one of the less-followed stocks
that I had selected, was also included in one of the
Apple articles so I decided to take a look at that
article, in order to try and save some time. The article
was from the San Francisco Chronicle website, and
provided quick summaries of companies that had
unusual price action today, as well as the breaking
news that was the cause of the price action. Looking
at the last row of my selections, which includes the
less-followed stocks, I decided to look at Conn's Inc.
since it had the largest move of the day, excluding
the move by Bio-Rad Laboratories. After another
quick scan of the headlines I realized that the move
today was earnings related, and after I double-clicked
the headline that I was interested in, I was sent to the
Bloomberg website where there was an article that
provided information on today's earnings releases.
In addition to viewing the news of the selections that
were made previously, you also have the ability to
either enter a stock symbol or pick from one of the
futures, or forex, symbols. This feature is extremely
beneficial, whenever a stock/future/currency symbol
that you are interested in is not listed in the results,
because you can quickly look up any of the breaking
news that has been published recently. After adding
two additional symbols to the screen (which included
both a stock and an ETF that I am currently
following) and deleting a couple of the stocks that I
am not longer interested in, I saved the results as
group so that I would be able to easily continue
following the breaking news of my selected symbols.
The third tab is the "Step 3: Heat Maps" tab where
you are able to view a heat map of your selected
symbols and, in addition, if you click on any of the
symbols you will see a table with symbol-specific
information such as the percentage change and the
high/low of the day. You are able to sort the heat map
results by the percentage price change of each
symbol (in either ascending or descending order),
which is helpful when you want to quickly see the
relative price performance of the symbols that you
are following, or by alphabetical order (also in either
ascending or descending order), which is useful
when you are following a large number of symbols
and need to quickly see the price performance of a
specific symbol. The heat map also allows you to
view a heat map of the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, the
Dow Jones Industrial Average, or any of the groups
that you have previously created (see Figure 1-3).
This is extremely valuable because it immediately
gives you a sense of the relative performance of the
market by providing a visual representation of the
number of stocks that are trading higher, lower, or
flat for the day, instead of only providing the average
percentage price movement of the market for the day.
For example, just by looking at the S&P 500 heat
map I am quickly able to see that an overwhelming
majority of stocks are trading lower today, as well as
which stocks are currently leading the market and
which stocks are currently lagging the market. That's
it! In as little as a few minutes you will be up-to-date
with the relevant information that is essential to
every profitable trader.
In summary, NewsMiner is definitely a must-have
for any trader who wants to efficiently follow the
breaking news that moves markets daily and
provides many potential trading opportunities.
Instead of spending hours switching between
multiple websites, and continually entering the exact
same symbols multiples times, you can use
NewsMiner to consolidate all of this information into
one easily accessible, sort-able software platform.
The most beneficial aspect of NewMiner, in my
opinion, is the time that it will save and the
opportunities that it can present, which the average
trader will likely miss. This could, potentially,
provide an advantage by helping cut news-related
losses quicker, or enter a position relatively quicker
whenever positive breaking news hits the wire, and
by giving each user the ability to potentially save
extremely valuable trading capital, as well as loads
of time, NewsMiner can help any level of trader
focus their much-needed resources in the most
appropriate places, while maximizing their internal
rate of return.
For more details regarding NewsMiner, you can visit
them online at: www.NewsMiner.info.
