How to Scrape Earnings Call Transcripts

Update: unfortunately, seekingalpha has updated their website to use captcha so automatic downloads are no longer possible in the way described here.

Textual data is an essential alternative data source. One example of textual information is transcripts of earnings calls where executives do not only present the latest financial results, but also respond to questions by financial analysts. Investors utilize transcripts to evaluate changes in sentiment, emphasis on particular topics, or style of communication.

We will illustrate the scraping and parsing of earnings call transcripts from the popular trading website www.seekingalpha.com.

Instructions

Note: different from all other examples, the code is written to run on a host rather than using the Docker image because it relies on a browser. The code has been tested on Ubuntu and Mac only.

This section contains code to retrieve earnings call transcripts from Seeking Alpha.

Run python sa_selenium.py file to scrape transcripts and store the result under transcipts/parts and the company’s symbol in csv files, named by the aspect of the earnings call they capture:

• content: statements and Q&A content
• participants: as listed by seeking alpha
• earnings: date and company the earnings the call is referring to

This requires geckodriver and Firefox.

• On macOS, you can use brew install geckodriver.
• See here for Ubuntu.