This project aims to provide an up-to-date data scraper for yahoo finance as a simple stock data API. For an in-depth view on the project check out its documentation.
There are a lot of APIs allowing you to pull stock/market data available for python. Pandas Data Reader, googlefinance, IEXTrading are a just a few of the massive amounts of data sources you could use for your application.
So why use the FinanceScraper API? Well, there are a few issues with a lot of the APIs readily available online:
- A lot of the APIs are out of date. Both Yahoo and Google have stepped back from providing APIs for finance data during the last couple of years and a lot of the existing project - especially on GitHub - were created before that happened and never maintained properly afterwards.
- Those data sources that do work properly, often only provide access to a few select markets, most of the time the American stock market. This obviously might restrict your application, especially if you are planning to cater to an international audience.
- Another issue with commercially maintained APIs often comes with the usage. The free access usually harshly restricts usage by limiting the quotes per minute or per day. If you ever plan to provide your app to the general public, or just a couple of friends, this could put you in a difficult situation of choosing between a free plan or a generally usable program.
However, there are a couple of things other APIs can do better than this one. This is why I do want to also tell you when not to use this API:
- You only need data from a single market. There are probably a bunch of APIs specializing in data from the market you are looking at. Take a look at those before jumping into FinanceScraper.
- You want to write a little application for your personal use only. In this case the free plans of commercially available APIs are probably enough for you. Maybe take a look at WorldTradingData.
- You need a lot of data very fast and have no means of parallel execution. In this case you will probably want to use one of the well established APIs, as this project is doing full HTML requests to ensure the most recent quotes possible. If you however have a lot of rapid requests on the same data you may want to check out this projects data caching/buffering capabilities.
If you simply want to use the API, I recommend using the latest stable version
which can be acquired by running pip install FinanceScraper. For the API's
usage take a look at the documentation. (I swear it will come soon, this is still
in it's very beginning)
If you are looking to contribute to this project please go ahead! You're going to have to fork the project and do your work in your own repository. If you are seeing anything that could/should be improved please put in an issue and I will assign you if you want to solve it yourself. In order to get your progress into this main project you just have to put in a pull request for a branch up-to-date with the current master.
Now I also want to tell you about what I am planning to add to this project for the next major, minor and micro versions.
currently no clear goals for the next micro version
- introduce more data sources
- provide a class that forwards a request to multiple different scraper objects and collects the result, returning the first returned result or None
- look into performance improvements
- as this will be 1.x.x should be well documented and very usable