A huge part of web scraping for information that helps in efficient decision-making is dependent on the effectiveness in the financial structure and identification of the right data sets by the data scientists and the portfolio managers. Identification of alpha opportunities (a metric that represents the active returns on investment). Mar 02, 2021 The simplest way to get started with web scraping without any dependencies is to use a bunch of regular expressions on the HTML string that you fetch using an HTTP client. But there is a big tradeoff. Regular expressions aren't as flexible and both professionals and amateurs struggle with writing them correctly.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.
Table of content
Web Scraper Client
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool which also provides web scraping service for business owners and Enterprise. As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.Web data extraction includes but not limited to social media, e-commerce, marketing, real estate listing and many others. Unlike other web scrapers that only scrape content with simple HTML structure, Octoparse can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies and etc. You can create a scraping task to extract data from a complex website such as a site that requires login and pagination. Octoparse can even deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code. As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring and leads generating within fingertips.
Octoparse has the Task Template Mode and Advanced Mode for users with both basic and advanced scraping skills.
- A user with basic scraping skills will take a smart move by using this brand-new feature that allows him/her to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. The Task Template Mode only takes about 6.5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel.
- The Advanced mode has more flexibility comparing the other mode. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data. With its industry-leading data fields auto-detectionfeature, Octoparse also allows you to build a crawler with ease. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let itscrape the data for you.The cloud services enable to bulk extract huge amounts of data within a short time frame since multiple cloud servers concurrently run one task. Besides that, thecloud servicewill allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.
2. ParseHub
Parsehub is a great web scraper that supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.
The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve an instant scraping. It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects. There are plenty of tutorials for at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.
3. Import.io
Import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It also allows you to capture photos and PDFs into a feasible format. Besides, it covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.
4. Outwit hub
Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly. It has an outstanding 'Fast Scrape' features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. It is a good alternative web scraping tool if you need to extract a light amount of information from the websites instantly.
Web Scraping Plugins/Extension
1. Data Scraper (Chrome)
Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
2. Web scraper
Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension. For chrome extension, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped. The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.
3. Scraper (Chrome)
The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.
Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text and choose 'Scrape Similar' from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.
Web-based Scraping Application
1. Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)
Dexi.io is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task - Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will able to address the details on any websites. For people with no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.
The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It offers paid services to meet your needs for getting real-time data.
2. Webhose.io
Webhose.io enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.
The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.
Author: Ashley Ashley is a data enthusiast and passionate blogger with hands-on experience in web scraping. She focuses on capturing web data and analyzing in a way that empowers companies and businesses with actionable insights. Read her blog here to discover practical tips and applications on web data extraction 日本語記事:無料で使えるWebスクレイピングツール9選 Webスクレイピングについての記事は 公式サイトでも読むことができます。 Artículo en español: 9 Web Scraping Gratuitos que No Te Puedes Perder en 2021 También puede leer artículos de web scraping en el Website Oficial |
Nasdaq, the second largest stock exchange market in the globe has invested in technology and web scraping by acquisition of Quandal, one of the largest alternate data platforms.
The need to hold data insights have always been a norm in the financial industry, primarily to drive insights and make well-evaluated investment decisions. This is why financial institutions – hedge funds, banks, asset managers all hoard data to keep their big-buck bearing investment decisions data-backed. Though the sector well understands the need for information, be it for equity research analysis, venture capital investment, hedge funds management, asset management etc. they do not have the tools to extract the data, get them in a structured format to draw insights.
Why consider scraping in finance?
There are so many sources and forms in which data is available. Turns out, every bit of this is as important and can really contribute to making better decisions. For instance, look how hints of mergers and acquisition data can be identified by tracking CEO’s travel patterns as Kamel, CEO of Quandel rightly states the data significance.
“What we’re interested in doing is tracking corporate, private jets, most companies hide the identity of their corporate jets, but it’s possible to unmask them, researchers carefully watching websites like FlightAware.com could theoretically piece together flight records to figure out individual planes’ tail numbers”.
Tracking of volumes of information such as news, social media, satellite data, app data etc. through an automated process such as scraping can help financial companies gain a lot of valuable insights.
Another interesting example is the one where Goldman Sachs asset management was able to identify an increase in visitors to the HomeDepot.com website by scraping website traffic from alexa.com. This helped asset manager to buy the stock well in advance of the company raising its outlook and its stock eventually appreciating.
Web scraping in hedge funds
Hedge funds are an investment that carries some risk in the ROI and hence the need to rely on data to accommodate the nature of volatility in the hedge fund market. Web scraping, however, will provide the investor’s information covering all angles – market forces, consumer behavior, competitive intelligence etc. that makes strategic decisions an easier process.
Going past the traditional methods like market data (earnings and macroeconomic data), a majority of the hedge fund managers are beginning to see the potential in alternate data such as information available in satellite imagery, geolocation, web scraping etc. The prowess of the web data is being increasingly recognized by the procurer of such data to unbox tremendous insights to have an informational advantage over the peers.
A hedge fund manager requires the assistance of web extraction to obtain these data sets from a third-party scraping service provider. Such data can be put to scrutiny by the data scientists partnering with portfolio managers to draw insights.
A huge part of web scraping for information that helps in efficient decision-making is dependent on the effectiveness in the financial structure and identification of the right data sets by the data scientists and the portfolio managers. Identification of alpha opportunities (a metric that represents the active returns on investment).
According to Greenwich / Thomson Reuters research the average investment firm is spending about $900,000 yearly on alternative data, and of this alternative data, clearly, the most popular form being used investment professionals is web-scraped data. Of all the methods in alternate data for hedge funds, web scraping is identified as the most effective methods.
What are the use cases of scraping in finance?
Equity research analysis
A huge investment decision requires an assessment of the financial position of the company in which you are intending to invest. Generally, the information needs to be gathered from the profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements for numerous years. These numbers can be obtained through ratio analysis ( solvency and profitability ratios).
Now, these data are available on the websites in the investor relation sections ( most of the public limited companies have a dedicated page) and in the quarterly or annual reports. The information available on these sites and PDFs can be scraped to gain insights into the financial strength.
You can take a look at the investor relation page of Walt disney .
This type of data is also available in the EDGAR databases that hold annual reports and the filings are available for download or can be viewed for free.
Let’s quickly get to an example of sample code for scraping annual reports (PDFs) from the Walt Disney website. These annual reports have tons of financial data points and extracting these data from annual reports or quarterly reports for several years will help in identifying a pattern and a thorough analysis of the same will help in making better-informed decisions.
Here’ a sample code to scrape out a critical piece – the balance sheet from the PDF document from Walt Disney.
Data Scraping Program
This code is developed as a sample to scrape specific pages with financial data points from a PDF document with high volumes.
The output would look like this:
What Is The Purpose Of Web Scraping
Financial data and credit ratings
To assess the financial strength of borrowing entities for qualifying their ability to meet principal and interest payments. This information is particularly useful for the clients if such rating agencies like the institutional investors, banks, and insurance companies) to evaluate using near real-time updates. This type of data can be scraped from websites, Google Finance Pages, and Bloomberg Research.
Venture capital
Small businesses or start-ups require funding/investment form big businesses and hence the need to research the companies before investing. This kind of data is usually available in some websites that have information on profiling of new business and products like techcrunch and venturebeat.
Also, there are a ton of trends, technology and portfolio companies that are required to be monitored before making an investment decision. A solution like scraping will help in extracting and aggregating this data in a structured format to make a strategic venture capital decision.
Risk mitigation and compliance
Compliance with regulation is very important in the financial industry and these are put into great scrutiny leading to millions of dollars as a penalty and successive reformation cost as a consequence of a breach. Through automated monitoring, of sources that post regular updates – government regulations, court records, sanction lists etc you can effectively improve your compliance and risk management position.
Even if these sites are complex or difficult to access scraping helps in extracting regulatory updates to stay abreast of the happenings and identifying frauds.
Ditch internet surfing and use scraping instead.
Finance industry needs tons of crucial information to make strategic business decisions. Scraping has been the ultimate solution for various use cases including venture capital, hedge funds, equity research analysis etc. The potential of scraping is immense and the volume and variety of data that scraping can give within a quick TAT is something every financial service provider should leverage upon.
Scrapeworks is architectured to scour the web data in the most fashionable and structured manner that can give information which can forever redefine the value of information the Internet has got.
You can set your parameters for the scraping requirements and we can deliver the data that you want.
Read through our customer stories to understand how we extracted crucial data points from company reports and financial statements for a leading news agency and extensive crawling and extraction of financial information for a leading financial services firm.
If you have a similar need, do get in touch with us.
Read through our customer stories to understand how we extracted crucial data points from company reports and financial statements for a leading news agency and extensive crawling and extraction of financial information for a leading financial services firm.
If you have a similar need, do get in touch with us.