Web Scraping And Finance?

If you're hoping to harness the power of information, the natural next step is looking beyond internal data to gauge the financial landscape.

Welcome to the age of Big Data.

Think of the broader internet as an untapped holy grail of unstructured data just waiting for you to reach out there and find it. From financial statements to competitor analyses, the information is out there, it just needs to be correctly harnessed. Enter: web scraping. Web scraping is web data extraction that is then managed and converted into usable information. Think of it as your way of listening in on the financial world around you, and picking up more useful information than you ever imagined possible. Want to improve your risk metrics? Or rebalance investment portfolios? Web scraping is the ideal mate for the smart financier.

Why Use Web Scraping in Finance

At its most simplistic, web scraping means that you can get high-quality financial data from around the world in moments. Web scraping - or data scraping - is a legitimate way to tap into the conversations that are already happening. It's legal, so long as you access information that is publicly available on websites. In a world of endless time and patience, this is absolutely something that could be done by an individual. But as the internet grows apace, you would have to compromise - choosing real-time information or breadth of research. So if you want to monitor what your competitors are doing or see the services and products that they are using to reach out to potential new customers or investors, web scraping makes the job so much easier. Also, because it's fully automated, web scraping doesn't mean you have to spend valuable time and resources looking for the information. Instead, it comes ready prepared with the ongoing, usable data that you need.

Financial Web Scraping

You know the information that you need, but you also need to make sure that the data is coming from reliable sources. A professional scraping service like Scrapfly takes the guesswork out of sourcing by ensuring that it only processes legitimate sources. Outsourcing to a professional web scraping provider also means that you can have rolling, ongoing data without the need to hire expensive data engineers and scientists. Present the company with the information that you want and allow them to deliver you the data you need - nothing less than the most usable, helpful information.