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For the past few months, I've been running a simple experiment. A script reads financial news in real time, scores each headline as positive or negative, and sends a trade to my broker if the score gets high enough.
For example, on April 19, TSLA closed around $400.50. I was already pretty beat up because I'd been holding a big position that bled out for weeks.
The next morning around 8:30 on April 20, a headline popped up saying Elon Musk ignored a formal summons from French prosecutors.
That was a big escalation from the usual back and forth. My agent flagged it almost instantly, scored the sentiment high enough, and shorted TSLA at $400.20 before I could even think about overriding it. I just let it run. By the time the market closed at 4 PM, TSLA had dropped to $392.50, down about two percent.
The agent closed the position right there. That one trade made me around 20% on a few options contracts. Not life changing, but the kind of win that makes you trust the setup a little more.
Now, I'm not saying this thing uses an LLM pretending to understand the market. There's no black box. I just used TradingNews' API and the news headline comes in a structured JSON format, then a sentiment score gets calculated using the agent I built myself, and if the score is above a certain level and the asset matches, it executes.
From my experiences, a lot of unuseful noise is added by AI trading apps themselves. They give you charts, summaries, weekly reports, all this stuff that sounds useful but doesn't actually help you make a faster decision.
I've been running this for a few months now. The agent handles about 60% of my small prop account. It's not perfect since it loses on false headlines sometimes, like when the Fed hints at a cut and then doesn't follow through. But the wins are clean, and the latency is low enough that I'm not competing with the HFTs.
The best part is the whole thing runs on a cheap VPS. The only monthly cost is the news feed. I've been using TradingNews for that which is latency, clean fields, reasonably priced. Everything else is just Python.
Anyways, if you're tired of paying for overpriced AI insight apps that just repackage the same news, honestly just build your own.