Alchemist Hour –
Using AlchemyAPI for Finance
Question & Answer:
1. What financial news sources are you pulling from to populate the
News API?
Our service pulls from any publicly available news source,
including CNN, Forbes, Yahoo Finance and New York Times.
2. You mentioned aggregation. Can you give an example of how this
can be useful?
You can use aggregations to find the most popular keywords
related to a specific company, per day. You could then correlate
these keywords to changes in that company’s stock to see if
any patterns emerge.
3. Can you explain Bring Your Own Data once again?
Bring Your Own Data is a function we are working to make
available in the near future. This will allow you to submit your
text or URL that you wish to have included in the data store. We
will then enhance that information with NLP metadata and allow
you to query, similar to the news service.
4. What document formats will be supported for our own data?
Initially, we will only support JSON docs. We are working to
accommodate other document types in the near future.
5. With the Bring Your Own Data feature, can I search in my own data
and your data together with a single query?
Absolutely. All user data and AlchemyAPI data is treated the
same way. All query operations are available for both types of
data.
6. When we bring our own data, can we also feed custom terms to
search for as well? For example, can I have Alchemy treat “apple” as
a fruit instead of a company?
At the moment, this is not an available function of our service.
That being said, Alchemy already recognizes Apple as a
company versus apple as a fruit. We can do this for any
company that is mentioned. In the future, we hope users will
also be able to provide specific terms of interest that can be
extracted from your text.
7. How is the Bring Your Own Data function secured? Is it cordoned off
from other users’ datasets?
The system we are launching will be on a shared hardware
cluster, but customers will not have access to each other’s datasets.
We are looking into developing private virtual clouds for larger
customers.
8. Do you currently support the Arabic language?
Arabic is not currently supporting by Alchemy’s APIs. However,
it is on the roadmap, so keep checking back for updates. Click
here for a list of the languages we currently support.
9. Can you please elaborate on the 1,000 transactions/day limit under
the free tier? Is it 1,000 queries or 1,000 results?
For our standard NLP service, it is 1 transaction per call, but for
the News API query, because we are providing the content,
storing the content and enriching multiple articles, the
transactions tend to be more expensive. We’ve seen an
average transaction cost of 85 per query. That being said, if you
pull news over a longer period of time (weeks or months), each
transaction can reach multiple hundreds per query.
10. Do you have a running meter or calculator to monitor your
transactions?
Yes. Utilize this call with the following endpoint to get the
information you need:
gatewaya.watsonplatform.net/calls/info/GetAPIKeyInfo?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY
11. How can the results of a query be imported into Excel?
There are many converters to convert to JSON or XML to an
excel-readable format. There are services such as Blockspring that
allow you to consume our APIs entirely within Excel or Google
Sheets. Use Blockspring with tips from Zach.
12. Can you talk more about the Query Builder and how it works?
The query builder is a simple user interface for building simple
news queries that allow you to specify a time range and features for
your query. We will provide you with the appropriate call and the
response so you can get an idea of the results your search will return.
We provide a number of example queries as well.
13. How could normalized relations be structured to capture acquisitions
in a specific country only?
You will be able to use the normalized relations service to find
any mentions of acquisitions, and can filter by country entities
to narrow the results specifically to one country.
14. Are there student-specific resources for entrepreneurs and hackers,
like extra guides? Or a higher amount of free queries?
There are many resources available for getting started. Here
are a few of our top suggestions:
i. Join the developer community and ask your questions:

developerWorks Forum

Developer FAQ

Quora

StackOverflow
ii. Check out these resources:
 API Documentation
 Getting Started Guide
 Code Libraries
 Machine Learning Glossary
iii. Contact Zach to discuss your specific use case and how
we can make it work with your API Key.
 zach@alchemyapi.com