Welcome to Finance Scraper’s documentation!

Indices and tables

General Information

First of all: if you have already read the README of this project you can simply skip this section (or read it, I really don’t care that much).

Alright. Now I want to express how happy I am, that you have found your way to this project and decided to even check out the doumentation in case you actually want to use it. All of this started as a small side project in order to provide some API for another project I started working on. After some long searches I found that a completely free API that can handle all the ticker symbols that yahoo finance can handle was generally not available. This is why I chose to further pursue this small side project of mine and here we are!

When to use Finance Scraper?

Before I tell you when not to use this API of course I want to get you hooked on my project. This is why I’m going to give you a couple of great points on why you should use Finance Scraper for your next project!

1. This API is maintained to stay up-to-date with the changes in its own data sources APIs. Over the last couple of years a lot of Python based finance data sources went dead due to both yahoo and google discontinuing their own APIs. This project is maintained to stay current to prevent your project from dying just because its underlying data source stopped working.

2. Other than a lot of the currently available finance data APIs this project seeks to provide data from not only one specific market, but cut through the same variety of international markets that websites like yahoo finance cover.

3. It’s unlimited and free! Don’t we all like free stuff? Well, the commercially backed finance data sources sure don’t, so they typically limit your usage of their API to a fixed amount of requests per minute, hour or day if you don’t want to pay for it. This is not the case for this project. You just get it and it’s all yours to use.

When not to use Finance Scraper?

Of course it would be delusional to belive that this project is the perfect solution to any finance data fetching related issue. This is why I also want to tell you under which circumstances you should probably keep on looking for a soultion that better suits your needs.

  • You need to get your data very fast.
  • You only require financial data from one specific market.
  • You expect to send out a few requests a minute, hour or even day.

In all of those cases you are probably going to be able to find a commercially backed and maintained API that suits your needs better than this project. Due to this API currently making full HTTP requests to its data sources there are faster solutions on the market. It is especially easy to find APIs that only cover a single market, especially if you are looking at the American stock market. They can be way more specified and may even employ multiple servers simply caching the current data to all supported tickers which will be beneficial to the user in the end. Last but not least, if you are only planning on sending out very few requests there probably is an API that offers a free plan next to its paid plans that covers your needs.

However, all of that said I still would be happy if you decide to use this project for your own work, as this is what it is made for and the more people it helps, the more people can give feedback and the better this API can be!