How to Get Up To Date News on the Australian Stock Market

Trading on news is a dangerous prospect. Especially if you don't have a Bloomberg box or Dow Jones newsfeed sitting on your desk. But that's another issue I’ll definitely delve into at my TradingCritic blog another day. Sometimes there is a need to get the latest news: perhaps for your own research purposes to justify your trade. Or for investors to find a fundamental base onto which they will invest their money. Whatever the reason for your search for Australian stock news, here are a few places where you may be able to find the information you seek.

I recently received a comment from Chris:

I've created a free service you may be interested in, to help stay informed about stocks. NewsAlerts will send an email alert whenever an ASX listed company on your alert list appears in a media article. Great for staying ahead of the pack :) Let me know what you think.

So I went along to NewsAlerts to check it out. Here is what it does: You can search for specific companies and find the most up to date news articles from major news articles. You can also define keywords so the website will monitor those words and be emailed whenever those keywords appear in the media. Here's an example page searching the latest news for BHP. I think it's a useful widget. Chris did a terrific job with his website. But I won't use it because I already suffer from information overload.

There are other websites that I use to get news and information about ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) listed companies. You can use the ASX directly to get those critical market announcements in PDF form, to delayed stock prices, company information as well as dividend histories. Here's the BHP stock page on the ASX.

Then there is Google Finance which does a similar job to Newsalerts. With dual listed shares like BHP you will have to use the suffix ".ax", so you'll search for "BHP.AX". Each page have up to date aggregated news (from major news sources), a company summary, recent blog posts, discussions, a management list and basic facts.

Google Finance is strip down version of what Yahoo! Finance provides. Here is an example page for Yahoo's BHP page. You can view a delayed chart, download stock price data into a spreadsheet (one of the most useful things that Yahoo finance provides!), latest headlines... and more!

As you can see, there are quite a few sources that you can find out news and information for stocks. You can use the ASX website for the latest market sensitive news releases. If you are comfortable with receiving email updates whenever a news piece about your favourite stock is updated then NewsAlerts is your best bet. If you simply want to know the latest news at any one moment, Google Finance or Yahoo! Finance can be your best friend.