signalstart-analysis

Scrape the data for the forex signal providers at www.SignalStart.com and provide data for deeper analysis of provider results.

In a hurry? Feast your eyes on the results.

Synopsis of Problem

The sortable, searchable list of forex signal providers provided by SignalStart is nice, but it suffers from a few defects:

No ability to search/sort by details of trader

While you can search and sort for a signal based on the information provided in the summary table, when you click on the trader, there are a number of other statistics (e.g. profit-factor, monthly profit) that are not available in their search table. It is available here.

No CSV available for all traders

That's why I wrote this web scraper. You can obtain a CSV by running this scraper or grabbing this file. I asked them for a downloadable CSV and am in dialog with them about it.

No composite calculations available

The stats for a trader show their absolute gain, but not their gain per months of trading. This is easy to do in a spreadsheet.

Spurious "age" parameter

If you sort the list of forex signal providers provided by SignalStart by age, you will that some signals are purportedly 50 years old but when you go to the details of that trader, you only see a month or two of trade results. This has been reported to them.

Installation

(suggested but not required: create a virtual environment before installing requirements)

cd signalstart-analysis
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

cd signalstart-analysis/signalstart
scrapy crawl signalstart -o data.csv
cp data.csv ../docs/data

on windows

cd signalstart-analysis
go

or simply

cd signalstart-analysis # NO NEED TO CD DOWN FURTHER!!!
./bin/run.sh

Visualization

Upload data.csv to Google Sheets and analyze.

Or push to github

In concert with https://github.com/derekeder/csv-to-html-table I simply render my latest CSV on github: https://metaperl.github.io/signalstart-analysis/

My docs folder was created via:

$ git clone [email protected]:derekeder/csv-to-html-table.git docs

and then I simply set it up as documented there.

Discussion

• http://mymoneymagick.com/investing/advanced-analysis-of-signalstart-forex-signal-providers/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/scrapy/comments/ghjygm/success_clicking_ajax_pagination_links/

Bugs

For some reason, I never seem to iterate through all the pages of the providers. I think I'm getting a stale element error or something.

That's why I sort by gain before scraping results - I really dont need traders with very poor performance in my analysis.

But ideally, I would get them all before my scraper barfs. Patches welcome!