With the rise of fintech and digital transformation, using APIs to obtain financial data for investing analysis has become a growing trend. GitHub, as the world’s largest open source community, has gathered many high-quality investing API projects that provide a convenient way to get real-time and historical data on stocks, funds, forex, cryptocurrencies etc. This article will provide a comprehensive guide to investing APIs on GitHub, with the goal of helping investors and developers take advantage of these open source tools to streamline their investing workflows.
Yahoo Finance API offers a simple way to get stock data
The yfinance API (https://github.com/ranaroussi/yfinance) is one of the most popular open source projects on GitHub for fetching financial data from Yahoo Finance platform. It provides a Python interface to retrieve OHLC, volume, dividends, splits etc for stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. The API is well-maintained and documented. It can serve as a drop-in replacement for the deprecated pandas-datareader package. Overall, yfinance API is a great choice for individual investors who want an easy way to download historical and intraday stock data for analysis.
IEX Cloud API allows direct access to IEX trading data
For developers looking for a more advanced stock API, IEX Cloud (https://github.com/addisonlynch/iexfinance) offers a Python wrapper for the IEX Cloud service. It provides direct access to IEX’s huge selection of data on US equities and options, including real-time trades, OHLC, short interest, earnings etc. This allows developers to build customized investing apps and algos using live market data. The API has detailed documentation and usage limits are generous for free usage tier. For production applications, IEX Cloud has affordable paid plans for higher quotas too.
Polygon.io API delivers full coverage for stocks and crypto
Polygon.io (formerly Polygon.io) is a leading provider of market data APIs, and the Python polygon-api-client (https://github.com/polygon-io/polygon-python-client) allows easy integration with their platform. It offers extremely broad coverage of US and global equities, options, forex, and cryptocurrencies. The free usage tier has generous limits for developing and testing trading strategies. Polygon is highly scalable and has excellent documentation as well. For investors and developers in need of a full-service market data API, Polygon is definitely a top choice.
Tiingo API focuses on clean historical data
For historical market data, the Tiingo Python API (https://github.com/hydrosquall/tiingo-python) connects to the Tiingo financial data platform and provides daily OHLC, volumes and adj close prices for stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies. The data is known for its quality and reliability. Usage limits are higher for historical requests. Tiingo API is well-suited for backtesting strategies over long time periods. However, it lacks real-time data which is better handled by IEX and Polygon APIs.
Alpaca API allows paper and live crypto trading
The Alpaca API (https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-python) focuses on letting developers create and execute trading strategies via Python code. It offers access to real-time and historical market data, as well as paper trading and live trading capabilities. The API has native support for stocks and crypto trading. For crypto investors who want to run algo trading bots, Alpaca provides an excellent platform to research and deploy automated strategies.
In summary, GitHub hosts some of the top open source APIs for obtaining investable asset data and executing trades programmatically. Investors and developers can take advantage of these projects to significantly improve their investing workflows. The options range from simple stock price APIs like yfinance to full-scale trading platforms like Alpaca.