If you run a financial website, getting financial data is a must. Going through thousands of websites is quite tiresome and you need a reliable tool to help you. Of course, that is easier said than done. Time is usually scarce and you can become frustrating going through one web site after another. So, what do you do to get the data that you need? You can get this data quickly by using a web scraping tool.
Many businesses understand the importance of using a web scraping tool. However, this technique of data harvesting is hindered by unstructured data, but if extracted in the right way, the data can be of great benefit. The data harvesting techniques can be easily applied in the finance sector since is easy to get reliable data in a fast and easy way.
Uses of Web Scraping Data in the Finance Sector
Essentially, data that provide insights into marketing plans, company information, and financial data can be of great benefit.
Web scraping is a technique that can be applied to gather all the relevant data that is beneficial for the growth of the business. In this article, we will discuss the case where web scraping technique can be used in the financial sector.
Equity Research
Companies that deal with asset and investment management can deploy the use of web scraping technique to collect relevant data to analyze fundamental trends in the industry. For example, continuous monitoring data from specific markets can reveal market trends. One of the commonly used cases is in the price and inventory monitoring sectors. The data extracted can be later used for analysis which can lead to great investment.
Financial data and Rating
Web scraping tool is the best tool you can get for your company. You can get data in real time and use the information for your own benefit. This information can be used by rating agents to extract data from thousands of company websites. Ultimately, this information can be of great help and value to clients in the investment sectors, banks etc. They can later make informed decisions from the insights.
Risk Mitigation and Compliance
Complying with regulations is crucial to all business, and also important to those in the financial sector. Therefore, web scraping helps those in this delicate industry to crawl in government sights to check any policy changes that are related to the regulatory requirements as laid by the government.
These financial sectors should monitor the news outlets those owned by the government to get live updates that directly affect their business.
Market Sentiment Prediction
News about how the financial market it is all over the internet. You can get such news in blogs social media and discussions forums. You can use a web scraping tool to gather all the data you need and stay ahead of the game.
How to go About Financial Web Scraping
Before you begin scraping data from financial websites, you need first to come up with a plan. First get to know what data you need and how you are intending to use it. Only take what you need to easily analyze the data you get. You do not want to be stuck with a bunch of data that does not benefit you. This will be a waste of time and resources.
Financial websites are so sensitive and you need to take caution when crawling into those sites. The site owners are very cautious about getting hacked and have put many measures to prevent attacks. To prevent from being blocked, you need to add time between your requests.
Make sure to use a small number of concurrent requests and include delays between the pages you are crawling. For example, when crawling ten pages, have a small delay before continuing with the rest. Doing this will make it make it hard for websites to notice you. It becomes a win-win situation.
Once you get the data you need, use it in the right manner. NEVER use the data collected to compete the original website owner. For example, when you collect data from Yahoo stock pages, do not use the data to compete with Yahoo. This is being unethical!
With web scraping, you can get any financial data you need that is accurate, reliable in a fast and timely manner. There is no limit on any web data. You only need the right tool to get it.
