Wrote a scraper for stock prices, what do I do with the data? | Hacker News Reader

Wrote a scraper for stock prices, what do I do with the data?

5 pointsera865 comments

So, as a side project, I wrote a scraper in nodejs to scrape for stock price information for all companies on the stock market. Now, I have a wealth of stock price information.

My original plan was to write a simple moving average analyzer that tells me when averages cross above or below each other.

What else could I do with this data? Any interesting analytics I could do? Just curious to see what other hackers might do with this information.

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Well, the truth is that predictive behavior stuff has been done before. So, maybe you could go another way; you could use it to track influence.

Say a NY Times article comes out about the american banking industry. You could track the price ripple from that back to the source article release time and check out how quickly it snowballs. You could probably actually use that over a series to find who is most influential and in what sector. That might be interesting.

hmmm that sounds interesting... maybe i can get tweets or facebook updates and somehow track how social media may or may not affect stock price movements

I'd be very interested in following this project if you go ahead with it.

The value would be to identify how Tweets from major corporate and political figures affect related stock prices. For example, how Tweets from @benbernanke affect the trading price of ETF's. The goal would be to try and identify signals that provide statistical significance as well as a lag time from when Tweet was published and stock price reaction. If we can find these arbitrage opportunities we could use an API to auto-trade based on the Tweets...

me too! This idea could be very valuable!

I'm not sure what you'd do with the data itself, but if you want to build some interactive charts to show off your project, Highcharts[1] is a good way to go.

1: http://www.highcharts.com/

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