This tab, accessed by selecting Data Sources/Proxy from the Options Menu or the MENU button on the main screen, is used to configure the News Monitoring feature.

 

 

The top portion (Streaming and Snapshot tabs) of the screen allow you to set up the different types of News Sources supported by QuoteTracker.  All the news retrieved from all selected sources will appear on the News screen.

 

Streaming News: News is constantly monitored from the sources and updated as new news comes in.

 

 

Select the Sources that you have access to and want to use to gather the news.

Enter the Parameters required for the source such as your login.

If applicable to the type of news source (such as those that are symbol specific), enter other options available such as selecting the portfolios and/or specific symbols you want to Monitor news for.  Click Apply to start the streaming news source(s) with the selected options.  The Restart button is used to restart the news stream if it was interrupted for some reason.

 

Snapshot News: News headlines are read from the selected site and refreshed at set intervals

 

Check the Check for News box to turn snapshot news monitoring on.  After turning the news monitoring on, you can specify the news source from the drop down list.

 

Select which Portfolios and/or Individual Symbols are to be treated as High and Low Priority, as well as the Refresh interval to check (in minutes).  QuoteTracker will then check the news on your stocks in the background at the specified periods for the specified portfolio and stock symbols.  Note the special selections for *** ALL PORTFOLIOS ***, *** CURRENT PORTFOLIO *** and *** WATCH LIST ***

 

RSS News: Rich Site Summary (or more recently known as Really Simple Syndication) is a Web content syndication format.  It is an XML-based and designed for distributing and sharing Web content such as news headlines and is readily available from many sources on the internet.  With this type of news, QuoteTracker is basically being used as a simple news reader to display this content.  It is generally not symbol specific and will appear on the All News screen along with the content from other news sources that are set up.  A good starting point for more details as well as several RSS sources can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/rss

 

 

Add an RSS Feed by clicking on the Add Feed Button. Type a Name to identify this feed and enter the URL address of the RSS feed file.  If the feed requires a login (such as a subscription RSS feed), check the Requires Login button and enter your logon.  News is checked every 10 minutes by default from the feed. You can change this interval by typing a new value (in minutes) in the Check every box.  Note that some RSS feeds set their own minimum polling period to minimize the bandwidth on their servers.  This is done within the document using a special TTL (Time To Live) tag.  In this case, you will not be able to set a lower refresh interval than specified by the feed.  Click the Save button to add the feed to the list on the right.

 

To activate the feed, click on the check box so that the green checkmark appears next to it. To disable news checking for the feed, uncheck the box.  Highlight the feed and click Delete Feed to permanently remove it.  Click and hold down the Info button to see information about the highlighted feed such as when it was last accessed and its status.

 

The bottom portion of the screen has additional news display options:

 

Keep only last X days of news - X specifies the number of days of news headlines that QuoteTracker will keep on file.

 

Auto-Show First Headline's Details - When selecting a new symbol on the news screen, this option will cause the detail of the first (top) headline to automatically display in the window without having to manually select to do so.

 

Headlines Font Size - Select the font size to be used for displaying the headlines on the news screen.

 

If you select a 3 pane the News screen will display in 3 panes, with the symbols on the left, the titles on the top right and the news articles in the embedded browser, below the articles. If you do not select the embedded browser, the news screen will appear in 2 panes, with news articles opening in a separate browser window.

 

NEWS FILTERING (Exclusions)

You can filter out specific news articles from appearing.  These filters, as opposed to the news filtering on the All News screen, remove the articles completely, i.e. they do not get recorded at all.

 

The excluded items are listed in the News Filtering Rules box and take the form of:

T:Title   (Title exclusion)

S:Source   (Source exclusion)

U:URL (URL exclusion)

 

Clicking on the Edit the Rules button, will bring up this window, which lets you Add, Change or Delete a Filter Rule:.

 

 

Here you can Delete a Rule or Add a Rule. You specify a rule that applies to the Source of the article, the Title or the URL (selected from the drop down list) and enter the expression you want to exclude.  For Source or Title, specify a character string in the expression.. For example, to exclude Bloomberg as a source for news articles,  Select Source and enter Bloomberg as the exclusion expression.  This will appear as S:Bloomberg in the News Filtering Rules box on the previous screen.  Wildcards such as * and ? may be used in the string.