📰 How to hunt trades faster than everyone else

The news is the most important part of any trader's day.

The more time you spend with RNSs then the more trades you'll find.

But not all RNSs are created equal.

What if there was a way to filter out the garbage and laser focus down on the news that you want to see?

Luckily, there is. Filtering and colour coding news will save you time and money.

What is the RNS?

The Regulatory News Service (RNS) is the news feed of the London Stock Exchange. It provides announcements throughout the day from 07:00 until 18:30.

All price-sensitive information goes through the RNS including company results, trading updates and contract wins, directorate changes, equity placings, and more.

You can access the RNS on free websites such as the London Stock Exchange and Investegate, however these don't offer any customisation and are purely to view each morning.

I use SharePad, which allows me to hunt for for specific words and phrases, as well as colour code RNSs depending on what they are.

To get started, we need to head to news on SharePad.

You'll then see this window with all the news unfiltered, and with lots of pointless RNSs that suck your time and add no value.

We now need to filter this and take out the trash.

Filtering your news feed

Once we have the raw data, we can filter it.

Total Voting Rights? Who cares?

Net Asset Value? Boring.

Price Monitoring Extensions - do you trade auctions? If not - bye bye!

If an RNS doesn't serve a purpose, then bin it.

Click Filter at the top, and we want to then click "Apply/manage filters"..

Once you do this, you'll see this screen. Now we click "New.."

From there, we name our filter, and begin to enter RNS announcements that we don't like.

I've started with "Total" and it's come up with two suggestions. I don't want either of these, so I'll include them both.

Think carefully before you filter. But you'll notice what you don't want pretty quickly, and you can always add as you go along.

Here are the filters I've included. I'm not saying you should use these, but it should give you ideas for your own filter.

Colour coding RNS headlines

Now that we've filtered our RNS feed, we now need to colour code it.

To do this, we can click "Design" at the bottom of the RNS feed. You can find it here.

We then see this screen below.

What we need to do is enter our phrase and click the "+" button.

Note that on the right, we have "Headline" with a dropdown box. This gives us three options:

1. Headline

2. Story

3. Both

Right now, we’re colour coding headlines.

You can select the colour by clicking on the colour box.

For this example I've selected yellow to colour code headlines that feature the word "Holding" so we can instantly see all yellow RNSs are Holdings RNSs.