Merging journalistic content and streaming market data – How financial news coverage is changing

In the volatile arena of financial markets, is vital that readers have access to the most up-to-date information for those make or break investment decisions. There are hundreds of financial media outlets scattered across the web and much of the information varies in both relevance and accuracy. What we’ve seen is that only a handful of sites offers both journalistic content and streaming financial data, which is key for readers to get the complete picture of what is happening in the markets.

In this post, I will try to point out what a premier financial news portal should contain and the benefits and value it provides readers. These insights are based on our experiences from working with some of Europe’s largest and foremost financial and business newspapers.

Journalistic content

The foundation for a news source of any type is of course the journalistic content itself, and this is true for financial news as well. A best-in-class financial news site needs to have a strong journalistic and editorial focus to bring their brand’s voice and tone to the news they report.

For financial news, this means providing two types of news:

1.      Analysis of financial and business events

2.      Timely (I.e. real-time) coverage of, and commentary on, market news

The reason why these are important is straight forward: It is on this content that newspapers have built their reader base. Readers visit their websites because they are looking for quality content from a reliable source. Despite the hit traditional media and publishers have taken since the emergence of social media, digitalization, and “fake news”, this their main competitive advantage.

Editorial analysis, and research of stocks and markets, are great ways for newspapers to maintain their reader based and build their brand strength and loyalty. And since these are areas where other types of media have a hard time competing, it should be the foundation for any financial news platform.

To generate traffic to these editorial pieces however, newspapers needs to combine them with real-time (or as close to real-time as possible) coverage of market news. A live feed of market news will serve as an inlet of traffic that can be “redirected” to the editorial pieces through posts in the news feed. For example, a post about a recent surge in the price of Bitcoin could at the bottom of the post contain a highlight of an in-depth analysis of the market for Cryptocurrencies in general. Readers will then after reading the post about Bitcoin continue to the editorial piece.

These are admittedly not new insights: newspapers have been writing editorial content and covered market news since the bell sounded of the first day of trading on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 1602. However, what has fundamentally changed in just the last couple of years is newspapers ability to now present streaming real-time prices from the stock exchanges, and investing tools to help readers analyse the markets, to show their readers the complete picture of a stock.

Streaming market data

In financial markets, timing is everything. Real-time market data allows readers to see how a stock is performing right now, without any delay. This becomes increasingly powerful when readers at the same time have access to the two points mentioned earlier: editorial analysis and live market news. This will allow them to read about what has happened in a company and  simultaneously see how it effects the stock.

This is an incredibly powerful combination because it will allow readers to better understand news and how it affects a company’s stock. Traditionally this has not been possible because newspapers have solely provided the news, not the streaming real-time data. Now however solutions exist that allows newspapers to do just that.

At Norkon, our Pulse  Financial news platform was built on the principles of merging journalistic and editorial content with real-time data to create the premier financial news portal. The portal comes with range of financial tools to help your readers explore, monitor, analyse the markets to help them make more informed investing decisions.

Pulse is an innovative and engaging financial news portal powered by real-time market data

Some tools included in the portal :

• Streaming real-time data – the most advanced solution in the market, Pulse can provide streaming quotes and volumes from any stock exchange
• Market news summary – automatically generates a news digest of the most important topics and instruments in the live market feed. Readers can filter news by tags, instruments, and date to find the topics and companies that matters the most to
• Real-time stock alerts – readers can set up their own alerts based on when a news is published, technical indicators, or fundamental indicators
• Stock Screener – a filtering tool that enables investors to set parameters when searching for stock. This is especially useful when looking for overlooked or undervalued stock. You can filter criteria in a multitude of ways, including; Price-Earnings Value, Relative strength Index, or general business sectors (i.e.
• Back Testing – allows readers the ability to benchmark strategies against historical data
• Portfolio – allows readers to try out their investment strategies by adding investments in stocks to a portfolio
• Risk Calculator – assesses the risks and volatility of a portfolio or a set of instruments
• Technical indicators – uses instrument volume and price data to predict trends and momentum

Each tool aims to help readers become more informed about the financial markets. There are many other investment tools in addition to those mentioned above, and each Pulse portal can be fully customized.

So what makes a good financial portal?

Digitalization and the decreasing cost real-time data means that newspapers now have the ability to provide a much more engaging financial news experience for their readers than just a few years ago. Leveraging their position of strength of writing high quality editorial and journalistic content and merging it with real-time data and intuitive tools, they can create an extremely value-adding and informative source of information for their readers.

This of course is not done overnight – they need the right platform for doing so, and the ability to customize it so that it feels integrated and aligned with their digital brand. Norkon Pulse was developed from the ground up to be completely flexible in terms of look and feel, and comes with a large set of engaging and innovative tools. If you’re interested in learning more about our Pulse solution and how we’ve helped our customers generate new subscription revenue.