Best/Most Comprehensive API for Stocks/Financial Data [closed]

Question

What is the most recommended free/public API for accessing financial market stats and stock quotes (preferrably real-time quotes)? I'm not too picky about how it's exposed (SOAP, REST, some proprietary XML setup, etc.), as long as it's got some decent documentation.

I'm planning to build a simple web dashboard in PHP with some basic data (basically a quick-n-dirty homepage), but may want to grow it into a full blown web app eventually. Any thoughts?

As I find some, I'll post a list here (feel free to comment if you've used any of them before):

Free

• opentick (soprano) // link doesn't work

Not Free

• XigniteRealTime

Answer 1

Yahoo's api provides a CSV dump:

Example: http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=msft&f=price

I'm not sure if it is documented or not, but this code sample should showcase all of the features (namely the stat types [parameter f in the query string]. I'm sure you can find documentation (official or not) if you search for it.

http://www.goldb.org/ystockquote.html

Edit

I found some unofficial documentation:

http://ilmusaham.wordpress.com/tag/stock-yahoo-data/

Answer 2

I usually find that ProgrammableWeb is a good place to go when looking for APIs.

Answer 3

Markit On Demand provides a set of free financial APIs for playing around with. Looks like there is a stock quote API, a stock ticker/company search and a charting API available. Look at http://dev.markitondemand.com