The Top Sites for the Latest Stock Market News

With computer aided ultra-short-term, high frequency, arbitrage and speculative trading becoming dominant over manual trading, profitable opportunities vanish within seconds (or even milliseconds). In 2018, with all the articles, podcasts, newsletters and blogs available it can be hard to efficiently follow the news and sort through all the noise.

Here is an overview of the best online sources for traders to get timely news about stocks, forex, and the economy. 

News requirements vary based on each trader’s profile. Long-term investors usually don’t trade based on news items, as it has a short-term impact. It is mainly the short-term traders and market makers who may need timely access to news for their selected stocks on which they bet money for quick profits.

Access to historical news items may be required to backtest and study specific patterns, price changes and other effects based on news items.

News sites usually have their own content creators, or they are authorized to source and redistribute news by partnering with other news sources. Most of the financial news providers go with a mixed approach. Here is the list of popular news websites for stock markets, economy, finance and related business news:

The dedicated News Viewer section on MarketWatch portal provides easy access to news items with timestamps. Its auto-streaming feature ensures instant availability of any new item getting updated automatically. Coverage includes global markets for stocks, commodities, forex and other asset classes, including fundamental analysis and reporting of macroeconomic data at country level. A dedicated tab for “RealTime Headlines” is also available for streaming data.

One of the top market data providers, the news section on Bloomberg news portal offers news segregated into different categories. News can be selected from appropriate sections – asset class, region, industry and general financial. The available search feature by default shows all news items related to the particular stock queried for and lists the news results tagged with the date of publication with all available history. Historical information is quite useful in correlating impacts of news items on stock performance.

Another top market data provider, Reuters too has broad coverage of stock specific, sector-specific, market specific news on their web portal. Available content is similar to that of competitor Bloomberg. Similar search features resulting in historical news items, with an added auto-complete feature for stock names are quite useful. The results page integrates existing price quotes with news items, giving a unified view to the user.

We'll toot our own horn here, since we also cover news, but from an educational perspective. On our Markets section, we cover the key operational metrics for hundreds of companies and surround them with news and charts. Start your own Watchlist to track your favorite stocks. You can also take investing classes through our Investopedia Academy. 

WSJ is one of the top publications to be followed across the globe for business news. Apart from the usual news and price quotes with related details, the WSJ provides easy access to email alerts based on available criteria.

Another top publication for business news, the FT provides comprehensive financial news with global coverage and categorized view.

However, the challenge with both the WSJ and the FT is that one gets only the headlines for free. Detailed news items usually require a paid subscription, which will also enable access to expert comments, editorials and diversified content useful to desired traders.

The homepage of CNBC contains the up-to-date developments across the global markets. The dedicated news section has category wise listing which includes news for U.S. stocks and region wise for Asia and Europe.

Many sites work in a pure aggregator role i.e. collect news from multiple sources and published them in their news sections.

1. Google Finance: Backed by the robust search functionality, the results page integrates lots on information including news, price quotes, charts, related competitor companies, key ratios, earnings reports and links to important information. However, the news items available may be delayed and is not necessarily in real-time. 
2. Yahoo Finance: This has a similar news aggregator role with similar features and coverage for finance related news 
3. Seeking Alpha: Another commonly followed news aggregator site.

Most of the above-mentioned portals allow free access to information. Creating a personal login on these portals is optional, but comes with the added functionality of email news alerts to the user mailbox, for the selected stocks. 

Exchanges too keep a dedicated section for news items for each stock. However, the available news items there are usually based on information filed by the company, and hence it may be delayed (depending on the regulations). For example, a company announces a dividend at their AGM, and that info is instantly covered by various independent news portals. The info on the exchange site may be updated later as a company may take time to file those details to exchange. All price action, due to the dividend payment news, gets into the market even before the exchange site may officially list it. Hence, exchange sites should be verified for their real-time coverage, before deciding to trade on exchange-based news.

Each news portal has a dedicated section for Business & Economy news. Examples include CNN, USA Today, and U.S. News.

Both free and paid access to business news is available for interested traders on online portals. However, trading based on the news is not for everyone – timely availability and quick action is needed to capitalize on the profit potential, or to avoid losses. Along with available online sources, active traders pay close attention to other media – like live TV, Twitter and newsletters to benefit from news-based trading.