I think this free website might be useful to keep in your research bookmarks:

http://www.statsweeper.com/

The following is an excerpt from an article posted at 321gold.com. It provides a good overview of the site.

"...I'm often asked how I manage to track all the data discussed in these pages. Some of it is simply being the type of person who (for better or worse) loves information and can't help but spend hours poring over obscure publications and webpages. But I do have some help. One of the main props being Statsweeper.

My associates and I devised Statsweeper several months ago as an in-house data tracker. The idea being a computer would be much more efficient at monitoring the world's financial developments than any person, no matter how geekishly motivated.

The concept is simple. Every minute, the Statsweeper system checks in with online financial and economic data sources worldwide. The Federal Reserve. NYMEX futures markets. The Energy Information Administration.

Statsweeper pulls a variety of data from these systems. Open interest in futures contracts, and daily trade volumes. Petroleum imports and exports....

Simply having all this information in one place makes my life much, much easier when I sit down to analyze and write. A lot of the data is not easy to get at otherwise. Did you know for example the U.S. government reports daily on its debt position, down to the dollar? The only problem being this figure is buried in eight-point font on page 20 of the Daily Treasury Statement. Getting the data straight from the source takes some doing.

Viewing it through Statsweeper takes only seconds.

But Statsweeper has an even more important benefit. Automated analysis.

The problem with financial data is there's a lot of it. Even collected on one webpage, you could spend a long time looking through numbers to spot emerging trends.

Which is why we've trained Statsweeper to keep an eye out for us. You just never know where important bits of information will turn up. Prior to the financial crisis and stock market crash, commercial paper yields were signaling problems in the financial sector. The few people watching this data had an "early warning". Many were able to avoid substantial losses, and even turn large profits placing bets against the market.

We don't know in which data sets the next important signals will turn up. And monitoring all the numbers simply isn't an option for a human being. There's just too much to keep an eye on.

But Statsweeper allows us to keep a finger on the financial pulse in just minutes a day. The system downloads thousands of data points every hour and analyzes the latest numbers against past series. Looking for emerging trends and unusual movements, the kind that suggest important events in motion.

When the system spots anomalies, it simply posts an alert to the Statsweeper website. Checking this site over the past months, I've been alerted in near-realtime to significant developments in gold futures, crude oil spreads and Federal Reserve monetization of U.S. debt...."

The above is an excerpt from http://www.321gold.com/editorials/forest/forest012610.html