Spiffy! A buddy and I have been working on a similar thing (not open sourced (yet?)) for a while off and on. The model we're going to shoot for is to look at online opinion on the stock as a base for estimating rise/fall.
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=80469 http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/28/twitter-fueled-hedge-fund-...
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/does-a...
How do you define and track the "online" world though?
Wink wink, nudge nudge, that's the secret sauce. ;-)
But more seriously, the plan of attack right now is just to scrape newsfeeds from news sources via rss.
While of course this is susceptible to bias in the media, my hypothesis is that so are the stocks. A rising tide lifts all ships as has been said: so long as you buy lowish and sell highish you'll do all right[1]
Other routes might be:
- stock trading forums
- industry news sites
[1] bear markets demand some kind of shorting strategy I believe.