The financial investment market is rapidly expanding, and its navigation is becoming more challenging. As a result, businesses must rely on information-gathering processes and obtain insights from data-rich websites to navigate opportunities and power their financial decisions.
In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the benefits of harvesting data and making your financial investments more manageable with data-backed decisions. We’ll also examine data-gathering challenges and explore a few practical harvesting methods.
Top Benefits of Data-Driven Investments
Gathering data can be challenging, but the pros certainly outweigh the cons in the long run. Here are the most notable advantages of scraping data as an investor.
Predicting Risks and Returns
The financial market involves massive risks, but the internet is filled with insightful, real-time data, which can help mitigate them and fuel your company’s predictive analytics. Today’s AI models can accurately predict investment risks and calculate ROIs by analyzing current datasets. These insightful datasets account for current market trends, leaving you with a no-stone unturned strategy.
Enhancing Investment Objectivity
The existence of risks in the financial investment industry means objectivity is pivotal for success. Investment biases are common, often leading to poor decisions, but these can be mitigated with data-driven investment strategies. Thus, scraping financial data can reduce subjective analysis, leading to objective and better investments.
Broadening Your Investment Portfolio
As a financial expert, keeping track of various industries can be incredibly challenging. Most investors specialize in a few areas, while an experienced investment company will rarely dare test out new waters.
However, scraping, parsing, and data normalization technology can help you obtain actionable data from numerous industries, increasing the scope of your investment portfolio.
Data-Scraping Challenges
While data carries an immense advantage for investment companies, obtaining it means jumping through hoops that data-rich websites have in place to protect their data.
Multiple Data Sources and Dynamic Pages
Obtaining data from a few websites is straightforward but becomes a nightmare if you need data from several sources. On top of that, websites today mainly use JavaScript, whose dynamic pages are difficult to scrape. Your attempts may end up with unreadable data.
Thus, businesses rely on custom-made bots, which can be adjusted to gather only the needed data from chosen websites, automatically parsing it as they go. However, these bots can be expensive, making them a questionable investment.
Anti-Scraping Measures
Websites often use data-protecting techniques, like CAPTCHA, IP-blocking, and anti-bot protection. These anti-scraping measures make getting data without getting caught challenging, creating a need for advanced scraping bots and proxies.
Bypassing these measures is possible, but when you calculate the expenses of using bots, headless browsers, and rotating proxies, the unstructured and unparsed data you gain might not be worthwhile.
Bypassing Challenges and Harvesting Data
Getting started with data-driven business decisions might seem challenging, but roadblocks surrounding the process shouldn’t turn you away, as there are solutions for bypassing them.
Scraping Bots
Hundreds of web-scraping companies are now supplying businesses with scraping bots to gather information from data-rich websites, and they’re among the cheapest options for bypassing anti-scraping policies.
However, most scraping bots will download everything from a website, leaving you with data that needs to be parsed and structured, while advanced scraping bots you can customize to look for specific data can be costly.
APIs
Web-scraping can also be done with Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short, which are excellent for gathering specific data, allowing investors to access software or app data with the owner’s permissions and set limitations. In contrast to scraping bots that mostly gather everything, APIs offer direct access to specific data.
DaaS Companies
Data as a Service (DaaS) companies like Coresignal also exist, letting you gather scraped data and use it to power your investments. You won’t need to parse the data, as it comes ready to use. Businesses in numerous industries can reap the benefits of fresh datasets without scraping them themselves. Your analysts will have their work cut out for them, letting you invest with data and form better strategies.
Conclusion
Navigating investment opportunities is becoming challenging in an ever-growing financial market, but the internet’s vast ocean of insightful data can help mitigate these difficulties. Such insights can help your company’s financial decisions, providing a data-backed look into the current market conditions.
However, gathering it is tedious because of the numerous anti-scraping measures and multiple data sources, but there are ways to bypass these roadblocks.
Web scraping bots, APIs, and DaaS companies like Coresignal exist, providing access to data-rich websites, specific financial data, or already scraped and parsed datasets and helping businesses thrive in the overly competitive financial market.