How to Monitor Crypto News in Real-Time for Trading Signals

The cryptocurrency market operates 24/7 and is notoriously volatile. A single piece of news—a regulatory announcement, a major hack, or a new partnership—can cause prices to swing dramatically in minutes. For traders and investors, access to timely information is not just an advantage; it's essential for survival.

Supacrawler’s Watch API allows you to build a custom, real-time crypto news monitoring system. Instead of manually scanning feeds, you can automate the process of watching top crypto news outlets for breaking stories, getting notified the moment they're published. This allows you to react to market-moving events faster than the competition.

This tutorial will guide you through setting up a watch job to monitor headlines from a leading crypto news source.

Goal

To create an automated, high-frequency watch job that monitors the headlines on a major crypto news website and sends an alert when new articles are published.

curl -X POST https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://www.coindesk.com/",
    "frequency": "hourly",
    "selector": "a.card-title",
    "notify_email": "[email protected]",
    "notification_preference": "changes_only"
  }'

Building a Crypto Trading Intelligence System

This API call is the first step in a powerful automated workflow:

1. The Trigger: The Watch API is your detection engine. By monitoring a container element that holds news headlines (like a.card-title on CoinDesk), it detects when a new article is added.
2. High-Frequency Monitoring: For crypto, hourly is a good starting point. For critical, fast-moving situations, you could even create a short-term monitor with a custom cron job for 5- or 10-minute checks.
3. The Action (Your System): While email alerts are useful, a more advanced system would use webhooks. Your application would receive a real-time payload from Supacrawler the moment a new headline is detected.
4. Keyword and Sentiment Analysis: Your backend service would receive the new headline(s) and immediately scan them for keywords relevant to your interests (e.g., "SEC," "Ethereum ETF," "audit," or specific coin tickers like "$SOL"). You could also run the headline through a sentiment analysis model to classify it as positive, negative, or neutral.
5. Informed Action: Based on the keywords and sentiment, your system could trigger a high-priority notification to your phone or a message to a private Discord/Slack channel, enabling you to investigate further and make a timely trade.

Monitoring Multiple Crypto News Sources

To ensure comprehensive coverage, you should monitor several top crypto news sites. Here are examples for CoinTelegraph and Decrypt.

# Monitors the main story headlines on CoinTelegraph's homepage.
# Selector may vary; inspect the site to confirm.
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://cointelegraph.com/",
        "frequency": "hourly",
        "selector": ".post-card__title a",
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

# Monitors the list of articles on Decrypt's homepage.
# Selector may vary; inspect the site to confirm.
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://decrypt.co/",
        "frequency": "hourly",
        "selector": "h3 > a",
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

Final Thoughts

The crypto market waits for no one. By using the Supacrawler Watch API, you can transform your approach from reactive to proactive, building an automated intelligence system that sifts through the noise and brings market-moving information directly to you. This allows you to spend less time searching for alpha and more time acting on it.