How do I get free real-time market Data into Excel?

· Market Data
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  • Andreas Grau Website: http://computeraided… Andreas Grau is a passionate financial engineer with the drive to improve the tools for complex economic or financial models. Therefore, he coinvented the methodology Computer Aided Finance, the Monte Carlo Simulation Tool Theta Suite and the MS Excel Speed-up tool Theta Proxy.

This is a though one… Everybody wants real time market data – in MS Excel, in Matlab, in Java, in Theta Suite etc. But, obtaining market data is very hard and cost intensive because the stock exchanges do not want to provide real-time data for free. Ok, but what can you do about it?

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Historical Data is not that Different from Real-Time Data

In some cases, website provide a limited set of real-time data which you can obtain using the description: How do you get free historical market data? Especially, using JSoup. But, usually the data you see is with 15min delay.

However, this solution has many drawbacks. An important one is: Even if you get near real-time data from a website, you still need a mechanism to automatically pull the data and push it into your platform.

Commercial Solutions

If you can afford it, the best solution is usually a commercial solution from a large data vendor, e.g. Morningstar/Tenfore, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters etc. They deliver speedy and reliable market data right into MS Excel and often, they have interfaces for Matlab or Java, too. But they cost several hundreds of dollars (and euro) per month. On the positive side, these market data vendors deliver also insight into the order book, which is extremely important for intraday trading.

Low Budget Solutions

If you need to save some money – and use it for trading: Go for the second best solution and get the data from your broker. But, only very few brokers provide a good api and plug-ins for MS Excel or Matlab etc.

Free Real-Time Data Feed

Now, there is a third alternative, which might be good enough for you: It is free and it pulls free data into your MS Excel as a real-time data feed. This software is called FinAnSu (http://code.google.com/p/finansu/) and is pretty new and not 100% stable. But, for testing your trading strategy with a real market data feed, it is totally sufficient. FinAnSu pulls the data from Google, yahoo! or Bloomberg Personal Finance. Except for the combination Google NASDAQ, the data is usually with 15Min delay. But, you get new ticks e.g. every second and you can test your trading strategy in a realistic environment.

Conclusion

So, if you can live with a 15min data delay and without order book, go for FinAnSu. Otherwise, real trading requires real investments into data and you have to go for a commercial data vendor.

12 Comments

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  1. Nash

    Wham bam thank you, ma’am, my questions are aswnreed!

    Reply

  3. Muqil

    thanks

    Reply

  4. saa

    try appliedalgo.com, they have builtin http commands which fetches/parse webpages, store them in embedded Firebird database – you can use their Extension API (.NET, quite simple) to access previously saved data, They have bundled samples which fetches sp500, nasdaq, hsi, ftse, csi, kospi, yield cuves, to macro economic data.

    Reply

  6. Chris

    I found Barchart OnDemand featuring SOAP financial data API compatibility, along with streaming JSON, CSV, and XML formatting. Their infrastructure is always ready for cloud storage back-up and reference. You always get the option of dowloaing the results with CSV file. However, they take a nominal fees to use all their APIs.

    Reply

  7. HSINLI

    Thanks for your information!
    Due to your post, I downloaded the Finansu adds-in and use it. But I don’t understand what’t the means of “security_id” (=Quote(security_id, source, params, live_updating, frequency, show_headers)
    Is this the symbol of quote?or?
    And is Finansu suitable for getting the ETF data?
    Thanks!

    Reply

  10. Minnie Owen

    Yahoo Finance API is not working anymore.
    I switch to MarketXLS.
    They have regular updates and customer support.
    It cost a little but it will save you time.

    Reply

  11. Alex

    https://intrinio.com offers an excel plug-in for a boat load of financial data feeds. They have free and paid tiers as well, so you only pay for what you need.

    Reply

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