I’m building a financial valuation web and mobile application. For now, the app includes the ability for users to populate company fundamentals (revenue, net income, etc) and closing stock prices themselves. This will not be an attractive long-term solution for adoption, given the availability of market data, so I will eventually need to hook into a financial API, like Xignite. Since I am very far from launch and not looking to pay for this data just yet (free trials are short), I am looking for a way to add dummy code that I can easily strip out when it comes time to plug in the real thing.
Do any providers offer something like this for development? I would imagine not, since why would they provide it without the guarantee I’m going to pay them someday? Perhaps a package somewhere? For now, I am including dummy data through fixtures in my “companies” collection, but this feels like a poor stopgap measure and doesn’t let me address historical prices. I know that when the time comes, I’ll have a lot of work ahead of me to hook in the real API and I’m brand new at this (first thing I’ve ever built). Better to do it right the first time than scrapping work later on.
The only package with a historical financial dataset that I’ve run across is the awatson1978:dataset-dowjones package I put together for testing the D3 Calendar View. It’s probably not what you’re looking for; but it’s something.
Thanks Abigail. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work for me, but I am hoping to look through in more detail because I need to learn D3 for what I’m building.
Asked a different way, what is the typical way to build using an API? Do I need to pay for data during development? Or is there any way to avoid that?
If anyone would like to discuss creating original packages focused on financial data, I’d be very interested (bringing market data and financial services experience, if not development experience).
" . . . hesitant to use any APIs from Yahoo . . . " Seriously? Yahoo Mail has gone to hell. That’s true. However, their financial stuff is 1st class and has been for decades (well … almost).
Hesitant because I need more than just stock quotes. I’m looking for historical fundamentals and forward estimates as well. Yahoo very well may have this information but I can’t for the life of me find it. A simple search online yields lots of outdated posts on other sites talking about APIs and nothing direct from Yahoo on how to use their service or what fields are available. Nothing like some of the new services that list out inventories of data on theirk websites.
I’d be very happy to be proven wrong, given how recognizable the name is (would add some credibility to my app).
If you are comfy with XPath &/or CSS selectors you should be able to get most of what you need. You can get the XPath of the data you want very easily using Google Chrome. For example, if you open this link, then open Chrome’s Javascript Console and use the element inspector you can select a single field of data. Right-click to get a popup menu, and select “Copy XPath” oe CSS Path…
Without much difficulty you could screen scrape the HTML of hundreds of pages, run XPath queries on each of them and shovel all the data into MongoDB.
You could use MarketXLS.
They have regular updates and customer support unlike yahoo.
It cost a little but it would save you time.
Yahoo Finance API had already been discontinued.
This thread reminds me of a cool service that should allow you to access financial data and even make trades at some point for free: https://alpaca.markets/ I have not done anything with their API, but it looks pretty nice.
I pay attention to advancements in this space, as it’s an interest to me.
