Trade the News Review: An Inside Look at this News Streamer

About Trade the News

Trade the News is a financial news service platform that focuses on providing concise, actionable headlines to traders as fast as possible. Compared to similar news services, Trade the News boasts extremely fast real-time news and offers headlines across a diverse array of feeds, including equities, commodities, and currencies. In addition, the headlines promoted by the service are to-the-point, making it easier to make fast decisions without poring through paragraphs of text.

Trade the News Pricing Options

Trade the News operates as a subscription service with five pricing tiers for different levels of service. A free trial is available, although note that a LinkedIn profile is required to start the trial.

Trade the News subscriptions start at $150 per month for a text-only service, which provides an online streaming headline service, a financial events calendar, and customizable morning email reports and a morning update tab. For an additional $75 per month, traders get access to Trade the News’ 13F Radar service, which provides headlines and in-depth analysis regarding 13F filings and allows traders to build a custom watchlist that follows 13F filings.

The most expensive service tier costs $350 per month and includes not only the 13F Radar service, but also access to Trade the News’ audio squawk headlines and the ability to ask the service’s analysts questions in a live chat box.

Traders interested in commodities and foreign exchange news will need to purchase a separate – or additional – subscription. This service costs $85 per month for the text-only headline service, or $185 per month for audio squawk and live chat box access.

Trade the News Features

News Feed

The news feed is the heart of Trade the News and is designed for simplicity to make it fast and easy for traders to find the headlines that interest them. Trade the News has two advantages over competitors when it comes to the news feed. First, the headlines are direct and provide the takeaway point front-and-center, rather than presenting cryptic information that requires diving into the full article. This is huge for traders scanning for actionable information. Second, the news updates from Trade the News are significantly faster than from other financial news services – a major consideration for traders trying to profit off of news.

The news feed is searchable via a simple text box, which allows for entering specific stock symbols. The feed can also be filtered by sector or by a custom portfolio, although it does not provide stock scanning tools that would allow traders to filter by fundamentals or price movements.

The news feed is not particularly customizable when it comes to layout, but there is a small panel at the bottom that can be toggled between previews of the article corresponding to a selected headline, 13F filing information showing which institutional investment firms hold the stock referred to in the headline, and simple hourly charts displaying global market data information.

Calendars

The weekly calendar tab shows a simple flat view of all of the financial events of note for the coming week. The calendar can get somewhat since it not only includes major financial events, such as earnings reports, conference calls, and dividends, for example, but also presentations by CEOs to outside groups and numerous minor report releases. However, since the calendar covers an entire week at a time it is a good source of information to plan sectors or equities to watch for the week ahead.

Earnings announcements are included in the weekly calendar but also have a calendar of their own that is somewhat more customizable. Traders have the ability to specify a date range for the flat view version of the calendar or can look at earnings reports on weekly or monthly timescales on a traditional calendar view.

Event Watch & Morning Report

A major advantage of Trade the News is the service’s aggregation of important news at the start of each day. The morning report includes a wealth of general information, starting with summaries of the movements of the major global markets and commodities. The report also includes highlights of large after-market movements, a list of overnight analyst ratings changes, and a list of upcoming earnings reports. Additional morning reports are available for the European and Asian markets specifically.

The event watch report is a PDF published by Trade the News analysts that provides much more detailed information beyond the key highlights covered in the morning report. This report includes information about major news headlines that have the potential to affect markets, news of mergers and acquisitions, and summaries of financial and economic outlook reports for numerous sectors and for countries around the world.

13F Radar

The 13F Radar service, which requires a second-tier subscription, allows traders to see what institutional investors are trading. Trade the News makes it easy to visualize this information by generating pie charts for each 13F filing, allowing traders to see portfolios by sectors at a glance and to click deeper into the top gainers and losers and new holdings for each firm. The list of 13F filings can be sorted according to firms that hold a certain percentage of their portfolio in a chose sector, as well as according to the location and size of firms.

Customization and Saved Layouts

Trade the News does not offer much in the way of customizable windows or saved layouts. However, the tabs are designed in such a way that is friendly for most users and makes it easy to find the most recent information near the top of the page. Users may be frustrated, however, by the inability to open tabs side-by-side within a single browser window.

Trade the News Platform Differentiators

Compared to other financial news aggregation services, Trade the News is faster at putting up headlines, and better at offering concise and actionable headlines. These advantages make a significant difference for traders looking for any edge when using the news as part of a broader trading strategy. In addition, Trade the News offers both wide-view and extremely detailed reports each morning that get traders prepared for the day. Searchable access to 13F filings is also a major advantage of this service, even though this information costs more to access.

What Type of Trader is Trade the News Best for?

Trade the News is best for traders who use financial news extensively as part of their trading strategy. The speed of the news service is a major advantage for traders who are willing to trade on a headline alone, but the cost may not be justified compared to other news services when it comes to traders who prefer to meticulously research an equity after the appearance of a headline. In addition, the global focus of Trade the News may be significantly more suited for traders who are operating in European or Asian markets in addition to the American market.

Traders interested in capitalizing on the information afforded by 13F filings can also benefit from Trade the News thanks to the 13F Radar service. This service allows traders to mimic the moves of large, analyst-driven investment firms, or to check their own trades against what institutional investors are doing.

Pros and Cons of Trade The News

Pros

• News service provides headlines faster than most competitors, especially brokerage news feeds
• Headlines are concise and provide actionable information without diving into full stories
• Morning report and event watch reports provide overview information to prepare traders for each day
• 13F Radar allows in-depth analysis of what institutional investors are holding and trading
• Format is user-friendly and easy to navigate

Cons

• Service can be expensive, especially with addition of 13F Radar service
• No ability to filter news feed based on equities’ fundamentals or a given day’s price movements
• Difficult to display side-by-side windows