Rik's Ramblings

Tuesday, September 05, 2017

Google Finance News Spam

When checking up on my sizeable stock portfolio, I like to peruse Google Finance.

Unfortunately, the news articles that accompany the financial info have become entirely useless.  I think it's been so about a year now, and Google seem to be unable, or unwilling, to filter the shit out.

Many of the stories presented in the news list appear to be entirely machine generated.  They are incredibly heavy on statistics (which are easy to generate by scraping data from the web) but lacking any form of analysis or news.

Here's an except from one today about Wal-Mart:

Looking a bit close further out we see that the stock is -3.09% for the past month and 7.59% over the past year. The stock price is at a -4.42% downfall to its 52-week high and above 20.05% to a 52-week low. Analysts assigned mean rating at 2.50. The forward P/E is at 16.92 and the trailing P/E is at 18.86. WMT’s annual dividend yield measured at 2.60%. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT) is growing 0.38% to $78.37. 

Values, percentages and dates wrapped in some computer generated sentences.

These "news" articles always come with a great tease of a title.  Not sure if they're also boilerplate or of someone has to make that up.

This particular article even came with a great bio of the author.  Tellingly, the grammar was terrible and the gender of the alleged author changed during the bio, leading me to believe that it too was computer generated:

K*** G******* has over 14 years experience in the stock industry giving him a vast understanding of how news affects the financial markets. She is the driving force behind ... 

Monday, September 04, 2017

Doorshox

http://www.doorshox.com/

DoorShox is a removable magnetic car door guard that provides superior truck and car paint protection... 

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I mean, how neurotic do you have to be to go to such lengths when you park your car?