Seconds Away From News Analytics

A little while ago we gave an example of how to get access to our News Analytic content using R. While this was pretty straightforward, we wanted to find an even easier way to use the Recorded Future API. I’ve put together an example spreadsheet that loads requested Recorded Future data live into a Google Spreadsheet and then combines that data with historical finance data from the Google Finance API. The result: a spreadsheet that will populate itself with media analytic data and stock market data straight from the web. Just enter in a list of stock tickers, a date range, and a Recorded Future API token - and within a few seconds you should have plenty of data, ripe for analysis.

What can we do with it? I’ve linked a “motion chart” to the spreadsheet. After switching around the chart type, I’ve set stock price on the y-axis, time on the x-axis, and color-coded my stock prices according to momentum. I see some interesting days of high momentum, particularly for Intel. One of these seems to be focused on August 5, 2010 - the day the FTC won an anti-trust settlement against Intel.

I’ve taken advantage of Google Apps Script to write a script that picks up spreadsheet data, runs queries against our API, Google Finance’s API, and does some processing to merge the results. Data is then put in a seperate spreadsheet “Stock Data”. The motion chart updates when the contents of that sheet change.

If you’d like to put your own token in the spreadsheet, go to File -> Make a Copy, and the sheet will be editable in your Google docs storage area. To see the code that runs when you click the “Run!” button, you can then go to Tools -> Scripts -> Script Editor.

By the way, if this kind of data is interesting to you, we have it in bulk for API customers for the S&P500 and the Russell 3000 - so you don’t have to manually enter hundreds of tickers!