Introducing the WebSocket Raw Channel — Real-Time News at Maximum Speed

At finlight, our mission has always been simple: deliver financial and geopolitical news in real time, structured and ready to use.

Many of our users rely on enriched news streams with sentiment analysis, entity tagging, and confidence scores. But we also heard a clear message from the community:

Not everyone needs enrichment.
Some systems just need the news as fast as possible.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new addition to the finlight platform:

⚡ The WebSocket Raw Channel

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What Is the WebSocket Raw Channel?

The WebSocket Raw Channel is a real-time streaming endpoint that delivers raw news articles with minimal processing.

Unlike the standard WebSocket stream, the raw channel skips AI enrichment such as sentiment analysis and entity recognition. This reduces processing overhead and allows articles to be delivered with extremely low latency.

Key benefits include:

• 🚀 Faster delivery
• 🔌 Smaller payload sizes
• 🧠 Simplified data structure
• 🛠️ Full control over downstream processing

You receive the article data as soon as it enters our pipeline, without additional transformation.

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Who Is It For?

The raw channel is designed for developers and teams who value speed, flexibility, and control.

Typical use cases include:

• 📈 Latency-sensitive trading systems
• 🤖 Custom NLP or machine learning pipelines
• 🧪 Research and quantitative analysis
• 📊 Real-time dashboards and monitoring tools
• 🔄 Systems with their own enrichment layers

If you already perform sentiment analysis, entity extraction, or filtering internally, the raw channel integrates cleanly into your existing architecture.

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Raw vs Enriched WebSocket Streams

Both options remain fully supported, the choice depends entirely on your application’s requirements.

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How It Works

Connecting to the WebSocket Raw Channel is straightforward and integrates seamlessly with the existing finlight client.

import { FinlightApi } from 'finlight-client';

const client = new FinlightApi(
  {
    apiKey: 'your-api-key',
    logger: console,
    logLevel: 'info',
  },
  {
    // WebSocket-specific options
    takeover: true,
  },
);

client.rawWebsocket.connect(
  {
    query: 'title:Nvidia',
    sources: ['www.reuters.com'],
  },
  (article) => {
    console.log('Raw article:', article);
  },
);

// To disconnect
client.rawWebsocket.stop();

The stream delivers only essential article fields, giving you maximum freedom to process, store, or enrich the data however you choose.

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Why We Built This

We believe infrastructure should adapt to developers, not the other way around.

The WebSocket Raw Channel provides:

• ⏱️ Faster time-to-data
• 📉 Reduced compute and bandwidth usage
• 🧩 A clean foundation for custom intelligence layers
• 🛠️ Better support for high-performance systems

It’s another step toward making finlight a developer-first, performance-oriented news platform.

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Get Started Today

The WebSocket Raw Channel is available now and works with your existing finlight API key.

Learn more on the WebSocket overview page and start streaming raw news in real time.