Any good Finance API? [closed]

Question

Yahoo! Finance feeds are pain in the ass.

Google Finance API seems OK but don't know why I can't retrieve stock quotes information for Dow Johnes, NASDAQ, S&P...

Works perfect with company quotes like YHOO, MSFT but don't gets full data for stock indexes.

There is an article at YQL blog on how to get this data from Open tables with YQL, but that table is missing in the list.

Can anybody recommend any good API, web service or a feed?

Best answer + vote up guaranteed.

Answer 1

Yahoo provides a free API via http. You can get real-time informations & historical data in csv format.

For example to get the S&P historical data (^GSPC):
http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=^GSPC&ignore=.csv

or Dow Jones (^DJI):
http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=^DJI&ignore=.csv

URL syntax explained at:
http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm

Answer 2

You can also use YahooAPIs and send a YQL query that returns an XML document, such as:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.quotes%20where%20symbol%20in%20%28%22GLD,SLV%22%29&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys

To make things easier, I wrote a simple YahooFinanceAPI script on GitHub. Example usage:

$y = new YahooFinanceAPI;
$y->api(array('SLV','GLD'));

For more complete information you can view an article I wrote at http://thesimplesynthesis.com/article/finance-apis/.