It is a fact of life that press releases influence the
current price of a stock. People react emotionally and buy stocks on good
press releases, and sell stocks on bad ones, regardless of the validity of the
press release. If you can get the news first, you can be in a favorable
position to take advantage and gain financially. This article describes how to
obtain online stock press releases when they are first announced.
One way to be the first to obtain online press releases
on stocks would be to constantly watch one or more of the financial News web
pages for a press release via Business Wire. Yahoo provides a popular and
reliable financial news web page (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw). But manually
watching web pages requires your full time attention. Unless you are some rich
tycoon who sits by a Palm Springs swimming pool reading the financial news web
pages as they update, this is probably not going to work for you. Like most
people you probably have other things to do, such as working for a living.
A better way to accomplish the task of monitoring the
financial news web pages would be to have someone or something else do it for
you, and then notify you. For instance, you can use web page watching software
on your computer or you can subscribe to a web page watching service on the
Internet.
Running software on your computer to monitor a financial
news web page, such as Yahoo's, is easy to do and gives you complete control
over when and what you want to watch for. It can also give you faster
notification on press release discoveries. There are many programs available
on the web to do this. Easy Web Page Watcher by Patrick DiRienzo (http://www.patdirienzo.com)
is an easy-to-use low cost program ($15) that does a very good job of
monitoring Yahoo and other financial news web pages. To use the program simply
enter the financial news web pages that you wish to monitor and the name of
your stocks. When the name of your stock appears on the web page in a press
release, your computer when notify you with an audible alarm and by email. You
can also watch for keyword phrases such as "contract awarded" or
"stock buyback" that would appear in any stock press release. If you
have full time broadband Internet access such as cable or DSL you can leave
the program running all day and night. The program runs in the background with
no disturbance to your other computer tasks. You can set up the program to
send you email alerts at work or anywhere else.
If you do not have full time Internet access, but have
email, the next best method of obtaining press releases automatically is to
subscribe to a web page watching service. Again there are many services that
do this. WatchThatPage (http://www.watchthatpage.com) is a free web page
watching service that will alert you by email when keywords you specify such
as the names of your stocks appear in press releases on financial news pages
you specify. The disadvantage is that you do not receive an instant audible
alarm when the press release is first noticed on the financial news web page.
You have to wait for the service to send you email before you hear about the
press release.
About The Author
Bill Peifer holds a degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering and has written
several computer technology related articles. bpeifer@numericnetwork.com
