What is a Stock Newsfeed or Newswire?
A stock newsfeed is an electronic transmission of press releases, SEC filings, analyst ratings, top stories, rumors, and other forms of critical market-impacting information. As a trader or investor, receiving actionable information before the market moves can be the difference between your portfolio being positioned for massive gains or positioned for excessive losses.
Without access to a high-quality stock market newsfeed, you can end up being one of the last people to receive and react to major market-driving information. The goal of a fast and reliable newsfeed is to provide you with timely, actionable information before the masses see it, digest it, and react to it. You can then capture the bulk of a drastic move by positioning in advance of the herd.
The press releases, top stories, rumors, and other pieces of information mentioned above are known as catalysts. Certain catalysts can build additional confidence or pessimism in a particular stock, sector, or market – thus driving the price up or down. This type of increased volatility can create incredible opportunities for both short-term traders and long-term investors.
What is the Best Stock News Platform For Retail Traders?
Most people rely on multiple sources for finding headlines related to the markets, sectors, or specific stocks that they’re currently monitoring. They manually jump from site-to-site, like Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, Seeking Alpha, and many others, performing their due diligence on active and potential trades/investments. But this approach is immensely inefficient and time-consuming.
What if you could perform your trade and investment research all in one place? What if you were alerted to every piece of news pertaining to your current or potential holdings in real-time? How much of an impact do you think this might have on your annual profits? When you know exactly what news is driving specific stocks, sectors, or even the entire market as a whole, then you can understand what’s driving your account – and properly position yourself in advance of major market moves.
In my personal experience, the best stock market newsfeed for retail traders is Benzinga Pro. But it’s actually far more than just a newsfeed. The platform offers many additional features to help perform research based on your personal trading style, including the ability to create custom watch lists, scans, alerts, and more. It’s a fast and reliable one-stop-shop for stock market news and research. Overall, Benzinga Pro is an intuitively designed platform that delivers powerful insights for all kinds of traders and investors.
What Exactly is Benzinga Pro, How Does it Work, and is it Worth it?
WHAT IS BENZINGA PRO?
Benzinga Pro is a stock market research platform that offers a variety of customizable features: newsfeeds, calendars, scanners, chat rooms, watch lists, signals, and alerts. All of the supporting features are great, but the main appeal of Benzinga Pro is the fast, reliable, and filterable newsfeed. Another amazing feature, especially for day traders, is the live audio squawk, which announces only the most significant stock market news without stealing your full attention and valuable screen space during market hours.
HOW DOES BENZINGA PRO WORK?
Benzinga Pro allows you to create customized workspaces based on your individual preferences and trading styles. The platform can potentially offer the information and tools for you to drastically improve your profits, but you have to customize/filter your watch lists, newsfeeds, calendars, signals, and alerts to fit your personal strategies. Without any customizations or filters, your newsfeeds and other features will quickly overflow with information that’s unrelated or inapplicable to your specific approach.
IS BENZINGA PRO WORTH IT?
The most popular Benzinga Pro subscription is the Essential membership, which currently costs $177 per month or $1,404 per year. This breaks down to about $4-6 per day, depending on the length of membership you choose. I can’t say matter of factly that the platform is worth it for everybody because it all depends on your personal trading/investing style. But there are certainly traders who have used Benzinga Pro to enter positions that have easily covered their annual subscription costs within mere hours or days.
Above all, I highly recommend the free 2-week trial to test for yourself if the platform boosts your individual trading results.
Best Overall Day Trading and Swing Trading Tools:
My Top-Rated Trading Platforms, Programs, Sites, Services, Courses, etc.:
- Overall Training – 2ndSkies Trading
- Market Intelligence Software – Trade Ideas
- Free Stock Screener/Scanner – Finviz
- Active Trading Chat Room – Investors Underground
- Premium Day Trading Course – Trading Tickers 2
- Trading Mindset-Related Blog – Trading Composure
- Trading Psychology Course – Advanced Traders Mindset
- Market Simulator and Replay Platform – TradingSim
For beginners, I think the best place to start is by focusing on the psychological aspect of trading. Most newbies tend to ignore the mental component in favor of “exciting” topics like “explosive profits” and “foolproof setups”, but then never end up achieving consistent success because their mindset is misaligned. They constantly sabotage themselves with their own uncontrollable impulses.
In my personal opinion, failing to properly train your mind for the market environment is the number one reason that over ninety percent of traders fail. It’s certainly not because opportunities and edges don’t exist – it’s because most people don’t have the discipline and self-control to execute on an edge with consistency. Take it from me – someone who wasted several years trading randomly, impulsively, and without the proper tactical and mental skills – that the mental component should NOT be minimized or ignored.
Be sure to check out the Frequently Asked Questions and Free Resources for additional information, recommendations, and tools.
Conclusion – How Important is it to Keep Tabs on the Top Stock News For Today?
For long-term value investors, it might not be all that important to track live stock market news on a continuous basis. But for short-term day and swing traders, a real-time newsfeed can be the difference between success and failure. I’m not saying that there’s no value in a platform like this for investors – because there certainly is, but real-time newsfeeds are built specifically for active traders – individuals who depend on short-term catalysts and volatility to make their weekly, monthly, and yearly profits.
Without an all-in-one research platform like Benzinga Pro, it can be an extremely cumbersome process performing your due diligence. It can require several extra hours of effort per day sifting through multiple news sources and various other platforms. Not to mention that the information you do find is probably delayed and possibly no longer actionable. So all that time and effort you put in can potentially end up being for nothing. Unfortunately, missing huge moves is commonplace for traders without the proper tools.
Is your trading/investing style one that relies on, or can potentially benefit from, real-time stock market news? If so, it might be worth checking out a research platform like Benzinga Pro. Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.
Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)
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This was a really insightful article. I enjoyed reading about what a stock newsfeed is and how it can potentially help traders and investors. I am not personally involved with actively trading stocks yet, but I can see how having such information could make or break you within the market. This is critical information for anyone who wants to buy, sell, and trade stocks.
This came at such an appropriate time for me. I started day trading and have just been winging it for a couple of weeks now. I have made some money on trades but ended up losing more on others. This post along with others on this site has really helped me understand what it takes to actually achieve consistency. Thank you for the Benzinga Pro newsfeed suggestion and other high-quality trading communities and tools. The free trial and other free resources that you’ve compiled have really helped me with my most recent trades.
Glad I can help! That’s exactly what I strive to do here – make sure traders understand the realities of what it takes to become successful and supply them with the best possible resources for doing so. If you ever have any questions, never hesitate to reach out. Take care!