Its no surprise the biggest users of webscraping today belongs to the finance industry. Where there is money to be made these firms use every single opportunity to gain the slightest edge to make better investment decisions. For years the finance industry has realized the most benefits to having a data driven approach with complex investments models using large data sets. Deloitte estimated that spending on alternative data may exceed $7 billion USD by 2020, with an annual growth rate of 21 percent
The landscape has changed in recent years with the rise of "alternative" data i.e data not from the traditional internal sources e.g. social media, geolocation & online product/price data. Web scraping as ranked as the #1 source for capturing alternative data. Finance companies are trying to adapt to the demands of gathering these "big data" alternative data sets but still having to resort to legacy web scraping methods which leaves them with unreliable and a slow data gathering processes.
webautomation.io offers a fast, scalable solution for Equity research analysts, insurance firms, Stock traders and Venture capitalists to structured alternative data from the web. Allowing them react to the market with more informed decisions.
EQUITY RESEARCH
Extract hundreds of financial statements in structured format to allow easier analysis of companies profitability and performance.
Monitor popular news outlets/social media by matching key words to track market sentiment e.g. using twitter feeds.
Scraping search trends from company's like Alexa.com and Google. For example a sharp rise in visit to Walmart can be a "BUY" indicator for an investment manager to buy more Walmart.
Scraping pricing data from large e-commerce retailers can be used to predict the sales volume of these companies and predict if they will meet their quarterly targets.
VENTURE CAPITAL / PRIVATE EQUITY
Scrape data regarding geographical presence to understand expansion of companies into other markets.
Monitor investment trends and "buzzwords" from sites like Techcrunch, VentureBeat and Angel List - Monitor competitor fund raising activities by scraping sites like Crunchbase.
Conduct due diligence by scraping publicly available financial statements.
Scrape Job listings for companies i.e If a company is hiring alot they are probably growing.
STOCK TRADING
Monitor the worlds conversations by scraping social media and news to spot trends for BUY or SELL indicators applied to all markets (ETFs, equity, FX and commodities).
Scrape sites like Yahoo finance for stock market data and trading prices i.e.. previous close ,open, bid, ask, days range, Market cap etc Insurance & Risk management.
Use alternative data to scrape background data, KYC and regulatory developments - Scrape profile background data of individuals to determine suitability for products.
See samples of Data Output
This data consist of more than 600 hundred lines of which each one represents a single(and unique) product's information such as its price, avalaiblity, stock, image urls, technical details and etc from EBAY
