ASX20 Announcements Review
Question: you're a small investor with a handful of small shareinvestments in Australian companies listed on the ASX. How do you
keep track of the announcements those companies make to the ASX?
There are a couple of manual methods you can use. You can bookmark the announcements page on the various company websites you're interested in and go and check them periodically, but that's obviously pretty slow and labour intensive.
Or you can go to a centralised point, the ASX Announcements Page, and search for all announcements from there. Unfortunately, the ASX only lets you search for one company at a time, so that's also pretty slow, and still requires you do all the checking manually - there's no automation available without subscribing to the ASX's expensive data feed services.
There are also other third-party subscription services you can pay for that will do this for you, but it's annoying to have to pay for what is rightly public information.
The better answer is for the company themselves to provide their announcements through some sort of push mechanism. The traditional method is via email, where you subscribe to company announcements, and they show up in your inbox shortly after they're released.
But the best and most modern solution is for companies to provide a syndication feed on their website in a format like RSS or Atom, which can be monitored and read using feed readers like Google Reader, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Omea Reader. Feeds are superior to email announcments in that they're centralised and lightweight (big companies don't have to send out thousands of emails, for instance), and they're a standardised format, and so can be remixed and repurposed in lots of interesting ways.
So out of interest I did a quick survey of the current ASX20 (the top 20 list of companies on the ASX according to Standards and Poors) to see how many of them support syndicating their announcements either by email or by RSS/Atom. Here are the results:
| Company | via web | via email | via RSS/Atom |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMP |  |
|
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| ANZ | |
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| BHP | |
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| Brambles (BXB) | |
|
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| Commonwealth Bank (CBA) | |
|
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| CSL | |
|
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| Fosters (FGL) | |
||
| Macquarie Group (MQG) | |
|
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| NAB | |
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| Newcrest Mining (NCM) | |
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| Origin Energy (ORG) | |
|
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| QBE Insurance (QBE) | |
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| Rio Tinto (RIO) | |
|
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| Suncorp Metway (SUN) | |
|
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| Telstra (TLS) | |
|
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| Wesfarmers (WES) | |
|
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| Westfield (WDC) | |
|
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| Westpac (WBC) | |
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| Woodside Petroleum (WPL) | |
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| Woolworths (WOW) | |
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Some summary ratings:
- Grade: A - announcements available via web, email, and RSS: AMP, ORG, RIO, SUN, TLS, WES, WOW (7)
- Grade: B - announcements available via web and email: BHP, BXB, CBA, CSL, MQG, WDC, WPL (7)
- Grade: C - announcements available via web: ANZ, FGL, NAB, NCM, QBE, WBC (6)
Overall, I'm relatively impressed that 7 of the ASX20 do support RSS. On the down side, the fact that another 6 don't even provide an email announcements service is pretty ordinary, especially considering the number of retail shareholders who hold some of these stocks (e.g. three of the big four banks, bonus points to CBA, the standout).
Special bonus points go to:
Suncorp Metway and Wesfarmers, who also offer RSS feeds for upcoming calendar events;
Rio Tinto, who have their own announcements twitter account.
Corrections and updates are welcome in the comments.
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