Comment by monooso
6 hours ago
I spent the entire day yesterday trying to set up some automated monitoring of my investments, only to discover most UK market information is locked behind stupid-money APIs.
Anything that improves that situation is a positive.
That's normal in markets and it even makes sense.
Think about it: shouldn't the market be funded by charging fees to the extremely wealthy participants? The alternative is that it's taxpayer funded, which is a tax subsidy to extremely wealthy participants.
Seems like a bit of a false dichotomy- other alternatives are regulatory requirements or taxes that force or allow the api to be provisioned
You can force markets to make an open API funded by participants, but you can't make it fully open (open API and open participation) if you don't want tax funding because then there's no funding source left. Maybe you decide a fully open market is worth being tax funded, though it's still mostly going to benefit very rich people.
6 replies →
Most if not all stock markets are for profit corporations making a lot of profit. They could have api fees at 0 and still make a profit.
Several such APIs include the equivalent data for US markets in their free tier, for personal use.
Only the extremely wealthy participate in the UK? That is most certainly not the case in the US, where your average salaried employee has most of their retirement invested in the market
Only extremely wealthy people participate in stock markets, in general. Other people use one of those wealthy people as an intermediary.
To participate directly in a market you usually need to lock up at least several million dollars at what is effectively an escrow service, so they can shift it between accounts when transactions happen. All your shares stay locked up in a similar service.
The line graph of stock prices you can see on Google is a lie. Real market data is, like, a live feed of who's buying and selling and at what price and quantity. That doesn't seem very useful to someone who isn't trying to trade on that market, and if you can't trade on that market why bother getting the data?
There also isn't just one market. Any two large financial firms can just agree to directly trade with each other, would you mandate realtime data on that?
They normally don't do self-set-up real-time monitoring though.
Ehh to be clear even in the US certain markets like bonds are not always that transparent.
If it's just for personal use see if your bank/broker has an API for market information. Most do even if it's not advertised.
Also some resellers of market information are pretty affordable for personal use.