Today, I wanted to play around with getting news headlines about the stock market “gap ups” and “gap downs”. Nothing fancy, just a simple way to see what’s moving.
So, I started by thinking, “Okay, where can I get this news data?” I remembered a few free news APIs I had seen before, and I decided to give one a try. I grabbed the API key – pretty standard stuff.
My Process
First, I fired up my trusty old code editor.
Then, I wrote a simple script. At first, I just wanted to make sure I could connect to the API and get any news at all.
After that, I tweaked the script to search specifically for “gap up” and “gap down”. This took a little bit of fiddling with the search parameters. I wasn’t sure exactly what keywords to use at first, but I just kept trying different combinations.
Once I got some results, I realized they were kind of messy. Lots of irrelevant stuff mixed in.
So, I added some more code to filter the results. I looked for keywords in the headlines and descriptions, things like “stock market,” “shares,” “soared,” “plunged” – you get the idea. This was definitely a trial-and-error process.
Finally, after all the filtering the data is good enough.
It’s not perfect, by any means. I’m sure there are better ways to do this, and more reliable sources of information. But, it was a fun little project for a slow afternoon, and it gives me a quick way to see some of the bigger stock market movers. It’s more of a starting point than a finished product, really.
