Forex Trading Library

How to Build Your Own Professional Forex News Feed for Free

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If you are an economic news junkie, chances are that you might have scoured the world wide web in search of finding the perfect forex news feed. While there are paid options, not many traders prefer to pay subscriptions which can be upwards of $50 per month or more. The free versions, on the other hand, do address the issue but has its own drawbacks in terms of customizations.

Another factor to bear in mind is the information overload. With numerous financial websites offering commentary, opinion it can get cumbersome for traders to sieve through the information.

The MT4 trading platform does feature its own news terminal, but this is subject to the broker in question. Some forex brokers offer news feed from websites such as FxStreet.com which offers timely analysis, while some forex brokers prefer to use their own custom news feed. Yes, there is Netdania as well, but in order to run this, you need to either keep the app open or have it loaded on your browser. (It can slow up your computer especially if you have few instances of MT4 + EA’s and any other custom scripts running).

So, if you are in the market looking for a professional forex news feed, this article will guide you through setting up your own customized news feed for free.

Step 1 – Using RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Rich Site Summary has become the standard in web feed formats used to publish frequently updated information. Using the RSS feed, you can quickly read the headlines (or even articles) from your favorite sites. With RSS, in most cases, you can just visit the website of your choice and either look for the RSS icon on the website or click on the RSS icon on your browser to quickly add the feed.

The first step in building your professional forex news feed is to collect the RSS feed from your favorite websites. The next step is to use the Google news feature (to save your customizations you need to be logged in) which can show you news related to your keyword which can then be turned into an RSS feed.

So, if you are looking to find latest information Crude oil, you can simply go to http://news.google.com and click on ‘Personalize’ button the right, where you can then enter the keywords.

Creating your news feed based on keywords in Google News
Creating your news feed based on keywords in Google News

After you build a few RSS feeds, you can then close the ‘Personalize’ section and head back to http://news.google.com where you can see the newly created topics.

Personalized news topics – Google News
Personalized news topics – Google News

Now, when you click on the topic of your choice, you will see a list of the latest news. Google does all the heavy lifting for you. After you click on the topic, scroll to the bottom of the page to find the RSS icon. Right-click and save the RSS URL’s to a notepad.

Step 2 – Using an RSS Feed Reader

The next step is to use an RSS feed reader that can automatically refresh the news contents for you. There are many applications out there, but one of the most customizable RSS application is the Feed Reader. Feedreader.com offers both an online version as well as a downloadable version. It is best to download the app to your computer as a lot of customizations can be created.

To add a feed press F3 or go to ‘File>New Feed.’ You can create categories and then drop related RSS links into the category, and you can set the priority for the categories as well as the frequency of the RSS feed updates.

The latest version is 3.14 and here’s a snapshot of how the end result looks like.

Feedreader Desktop version with customizations
Feedreader Desktop version with customizations

What makes Feedreader unique is that you can filter the RSS feeds, also known as a smart feed. The smart feed is what takes Feedreader to a whole new level and gives you the much-needed bang!.

Click on ‘File>New>Smartfeed’ which opens a custom logic builder which can be customized to show you only the news that you are interested in. The next chart below shows the smart feed feature where we enable only content that has EURUSD in the body (from all the news feed URL’s you have added) and articles that are not more than 1 day old.

Smart Feed – Customize forex news
Smart Feed – Customize forex news

For full documentation, you can go to http://feedreader.com/download to learn more about the app.

Get breaking news and alerts as it happens, for free!

Once you are set up, the feed reader automatically updates and alerts you to news based on your keywords. In just a few minutes and for no cost, the feed reader is your very own personalized forex or economic news feed application. The effectiveness of this app depends on the quality of your RSS feeds and how well you categorize the feeds. More importantly, feed reader gives you complete control over the information that you want to read.

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