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Are there any good, free (or cheap) sources to get information about a company's financials that I can access via an API or XML feed or anything besides screen-scraping? Specifically I'm looking for things like total assets, liabilities, revenue, etc.

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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go minimal
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6 Answers6

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Yahoo! finance has a really simple API which returns results in CSV format. As well as stock price it can also return Dividend Yield, EBITDA, Annualized Gains etc. Here's an example:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=MSFT+AAPL+f=j4g3y

A really good explanation of what it can return is available here

[Edit] I just tried to use the explanation page, but it has been the subject of a Yahoo takedown notice. WayBack Machine solves that problem: http://web.archive.org/web/20140503202125/http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm

Community
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indy
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Have you tried wolframalpha.com? for example if you enter MSFT it gives incredible information regarding microsoft. And here is their api information http://www.wolframalpha.com/WolframAlphaAPI.pdf

OpenSource
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  • +1 for this interesting alternative approach. I wonder how reliable/repeatable the returned data would be for the task at hand though, i.e. their API apparently returns decent structured XML, still one has no insight in how and which results will be computed for a particular question 'class' (e.g. a stock symbol). Do you know more regarding this? – Steffen Opel Jul 25 '09 at 13:59
  • As you might have already found out this is a new type of search/information gathering service. Personally I have not used the api to access but have played around a bit with interesting queries on the site itself. It is a nice pastime - to marvel at the kind of things it does. – OpenSource Jul 28 '09 at 20:15
  • Try it on VTI and you get an airport instead of an ETF. – derobert Jul 30 '09 at 21:35
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Xignite has a pretty cheap $50 a month or so api and it seems to be actually useful.

If you are going to be scraping web pages I'd recommend you just grab a useful library like hpricot.

mpurkeypile
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MattK
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I doubt it. Getting sanitized and cleaned up financial information is hard. It usually takes me a whole day just cleaning up the price data I scrape off the web whenever I update my data on chartgame.com

Matthias Wandel
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Likely not for free (at least for full details), but I could stand corrected. Reuters has some form of API that gives in-depth details on businesses. If stock details are sufficient you could get those for free from Google Finance API, but as far as I can tell they don't offer all of the other details.

Demi
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Try the Mergent Company Fundamentals API at http://www.mergent.com/servius/ - lots of very detailed financial statement data (balance sheets / income statements / cashflow statements / ratios), standardized across companies, going back more than 20 years

Eugene Osovetsky
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