Where & How to Get Stock Data for Building Financial Products

If you’re reading this, you’re likely part of the explosive trend that has been dubbed fintech. Thanks to the internet - information, data, and education are now at the fingertips of the masses. This means that everyone - if they want to - can become an investor. Naturally, this has created a significant need for apps, tools, websites, and software to help investors (both retail and professional) learn to invest, execute trades, or get more alpha.

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Everything in the capital markets and investing landscape runs off of data. It’s a huge part of any smart investment research strategy, and it’s the fuel that keeps all of the investment apps and tools running smoothly. If you are thinking about building a financial product or an investment app, you’re going to need a lot of quality, affordable data. In this article, we will explain where and how to get stock data for building financial products.

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Understanding Stock Market Data

The first thing to understand about stock market data is that it’s endless. With the explosion of alternative data sets, investors have branched beyond the basics and started analyzing parking lot traffic, credit card transactions, corporate jet itineraries, and even weather in an effort to predict stock price movements or identify undervalued securities.

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While this plethora of new information can be tempting, almost every investor needs access to two core, basic, and mission-critical stock market data sets: fundamental data and stock prices. Fundamental data includes basic financial statement information (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flows) and key metrics and ratios calculated with that data (like price to earnings ratio). Stock price data ranges from historical (often used for backtesting) to delayed (often used by app developers) to real-time (often used by traders).

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Most recently ESG (Environmental, Social, & Governance) has emerged as a popular type of stock data as the pressure to promote and reward environmentally and socially conscious businesss builds. Other types of stock data can include ETF holdings, analyst estimates, news, mutual fund ratings and more.

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There are two common ways that this stock data is delivered to end users. The first is via a display mechanism like a Bloomberg Terminal or the Yahoo Finance Website. This is most common with non-technical or retail investors who are simply monitoring and checking in on select data points. The second is programattic access, which can include API, CSV, FTP and more. This is more common with engineers, founders, and quants who are building models, software, or websites with stock data.

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How to use stock market data to build financial products

If you are in the latter group - hoping to build a financial or investment product with stock data - you’ve come to the right place. Thankfully, accessing stock market data for your app is much easier today than it was ten years ago. Companies like Intrinio have leveraged algorithmic and machine-learning processes to speed up the process of sourcing and cleaning financial data - using math instead of humans. This means the data is delivered through these modern providers faster, at more affordable prices, and with higher quality.

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Some of the most basic and popular ways to use stock market data in your financial app is by charting the stock prices so that your end users can view changes and trends over time. Another great way to leverage stock data in your app is to build basic visualizations to compare the fundamentals of one company to its peers. More advanced use cases can range from plotting similar companies on a chart, to displaying the ESG rankings for companies inside of an ETF,  to visualizing the upside and downsid of an options contract. The most important thing to remember when using stock data in your app is to pay special attention to user experience and design. Bringing the data alive in a visually appealing way is key for users to stay engaged on your website or platform.

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Where to get Stock Market Data for new Products

If you are building a new fintech investment app or product, choosing a reliable data provider is critical. Integrating stock data into your app takes precious time and resources. If your provider doesn’t scale, increases prices, or delivers bad data - your company could be in jeapordy. Large traditional vendors typically charge outrageous prices, and offer sub-par developer tools and technology. Brand new providers have questionable quality and reliability. 

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A great value in the middle is Intrinio. We have been building and delivering stock data to thousands of fintech apps for years. Our technology is industry-leading, and our support is consistent and reliable. The founders of Intrinio were app developers themselves, so you’ll find working with the team refreshing. We know what it takes to get stock data flowing inside your innovative platform - and we know how important it is to be affordable, fast, and quality. 

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If you are in need of a stock market data feed for your app, you can chat with us on our website today to get started with a free trial. We can’t wait to see what you build.

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