It is a fact of life that press releases influence the current price of a stock. People react emotionally and buy stocks on good press releases, and sell stocks on bad ones, regardless of the validity of the press release. If you can get the news first, you can be in a favorable position to take advantage and gain financially. This article describes how to obtain online stock press releases when they are first announced.

One way to be the first to obtain online press releases on stocks would be to constantly watch one or more of the financial News web pages for a press release via Business Wire. Yahoo provides a popular and reliable financial news web page (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw). But manually watching web pages requires your full time attention. Unless you are some rich tycoon who sits by a Palm Springs swimming pool reading the financial news web pages as they update, this is probably not going to work for you. Like most people you probably have other things to do, such as working for a living.

A better way to accomplish the task of monitoring the financial news web pages would be to have someone or something else do it for you, and then notify you. For instance, you can use web page watching software on your computer or you can subscribe to a web page watching service on the Internet.

Running software on your computer to monitor a financial news web page, such as Yahoo's, is easy to do and gives you complete control over when and what you want to watch for. It can also give you faster notification on press release discoveries. There are many programs available on the web to do this. Easy Web Page Watcher by Patrick DiRienzo (http://www.patdirienzo.com) is an easy-to-use low cost program ($15) that does a very good job of monitoring Yahoo and other financial news web pages. To use the program simply enter the financial news web pages that you wish to monitor and the name of your stocks. When the name of your stock appears on the web page in a press release, your computer when notify you with an audible alarm and by email. You can also watch for keyword phrases such as "contract awarded" or "stock buyback" that would appear in any stock press release. If you have full time broadband Internet access such as cable or DSL you can leave the program running all day and night. The program runs in the background with no disturbance to your other computer tasks. You can set up the program to send you email alerts at work or anywhere else.

If you do not have full time Internet access, but have email, the next best method of obtaining press releases automatically is to subscribe to a web page watching service. Again there are many services that do this. WatchThatPage (http://www.watchthatpage.com) is a free web page watching service that will alert you by email when keywords you specify such as the names of your stocks appear in press releases on financial news pages you specify. The disadvantage is that you do not receive an instant audible alarm when the press release is first noticed on the financial news web page. You have to wait for the service to send you email before you hear about the press release.

About The Author

Bill Peifer holds a degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering and has written several computer technology related articles.

bpeifer@numericnetwork.com