Headline Spread
A market-moving story doesn't reach every news source at the same moment. One outlet breaks it; the rest catch up over the next few minutes — sometimes the next few hours. This tool measures that gap live, for any ticker, from the last 24 hours of coverage.
Free, no signup. Clusters near-duplicate headlines into one story, then times each outlet against whoever published first.
Why the gap matters
If your feed is the outlet sitting 20 minutes down the leaderboard, you are not reading news — you are reading history that the tape has already priced. The fix isn't a faster refresh button on one source, it's watching enough sources that you're always reading the one that broke it.
That's the whole premise of Top Tier Newswire: 40+ financial news sources aggregated into a single feed with sub-2-second latency, sentiment tagging and custom watchlists. Free tier is live; Pro unlocks real-time.
How it works
- Pulls the last 24 hours of headlines for the ticker from a broad public news index (typically 80–100 headlines across 30–50 outlets).
- Strips outlet suffixes and clusters near-duplicate headlines into a single story using token-overlap similarity.
- For every story covered by 2+ outlets, the earliest publish time is t = 0. Every other outlet's lag is measured from there.
- The leaderboard averages each outlet's lag across every story it covered (minimum 2 stories to appear).
Caveat worth stating plainly: publish timestamps are the outlet's own, rounded to the second, and a syndication index doesn't see every wire. Treat the leaderboard as a relative ranking of who tends to be early vs. late, not as a certified latency benchmark.
FAQ
Which financial news source is fastest?
It changes by story and by sector, which is the point — run a ticker you actually trade and read its leaderboard. Newswires (Business Wire, PR Newswire, Reuters, Benzinga, Stocktwits) usually break; analysis outlets and aggregators cluster 10–40 minutes behind. No single outlet is first on everything, so a one-source feed is structurally always late on something.
Why do two outlets show the same headline minutes apart?
Most "news" is one primary event (a filing, a press release, an analyst note) rewritten by many desks. The spread is desk turnaround time, not new information.
Is a 15-minute delay actually a problem?
For a long-term investor, no. For anyone trading the reaction — gap opens, halts, guidance revisions, M&A — the first few minutes are where the move happens, and you are trading against people who already read it.
Can I use this data in my own app?
Yes. GET /newsspread/api/spread?ticker=NVDA returns the same JSON this page
renders, CORS-open, cached 5 minutes. Free, no key.