Show HN: Unlimited, free intraday stock data API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Unlimited, free intraday stock data API

styvio.com

93 pointsThePlugJumbo71 comments

All of op's submissions are promoting their service. HackerNews is not your free advertisment platform!

They has a history as self-promoter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431183

100% agree, I flagged it since it's in obvious bad faith/disrespect of HN's guidelines: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

This person has literally only contributed posts promoting his site, and at this point it's clearly abusive - two submissions of it today (this one and another), once a day ago, and once 3 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27790278 - 5 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786752 - 12 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776497 - 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27755511 - 3 days ago

Where are the docs? Is it historical, live, or both? What kind of data is it? Is it just a marketing ploy to get my email and no actual finished product exists? Love those Lean Startups

Not at all! The api is available without an account at https://www.styvio.com/api/AAPL The docs are super well done and available on our homepage after you login!

uhhhhh.

this leads to a Django debug page because you linked incorrectly.

The bigger problem though is running debug=True in production. you should change that asap it's a security hole.

Yes, definately aware. Were running into an issue where when running debug=True (even with whitenoise), our static files aren't being loaded correctly and an error 500 comes up on every page. Fixed the link as well accidentally linked you the docs page!

um, you should NOT be running debug=True.

> The docs are super well done and available on our homepage after you login!

What docs? I made an account and haven't learned anything from the docs that I have not already reverse engineered in a minute from the two sentence comment I am replying to.

You're right. I'll add a huge section that goes into detail about each of the API keys and what data each key returns. On it right now, thank you for the feedback. Edit: check them out now, went into detail on what each key provides!

I don't want to create an account to view documentation. No major APIs require that, why do you?

Speaking from a quant perspective - the tagline grabbed my attention, but inside it is currently a half-baked mixture of poorly documented ideas. Specifically: the charts are horrible, the API does not provide data that is useful/usable unless what you want to do it to draw some very unsophisticated charts, and there is no documentation to even hint at that the author has a handle on complexities involved in providing even just historical price data for starters (ever heard of split and dividend adjustments?). I'm not really sure who this product is for when we have Yahoo finance etc.

P.S. I did immediately wonder if I got lured into signing up just to be offered to install some kind of styvcoin mining software. No thanks.

Out of curiosity, what kind of stock data should a 'good' data provider have or what data is useful, perhaps easily monetizable? I'm not affiliated with Styvio.

One of the fundamental ideas the parent mentioned is divident/split/"corporate event" data. If you're serious about understanding equities, you have to account for these or everything will be off.

If you're new to stocks, the main corporate events are: 1)Dividends - stocks sometimes pay out some cash or cash-equivalent stock to holders. This causes the price to briefly drop after the date because if you tihnk about on one day you were going to own (say) Microsoft with $100 in the bank, the next day if you're a holder, you own Microsoft (with only $95 in the bank because it's paid out a dividend) and you get $5 dividend. But if you buy on that second day, you only get Microsoft with $95 in the bank. So the price on the second day should be lower. 2)Splits/reverse splits - Companies sometimes decide to adjust the number of shares issued and the price will adjust pro rata. So for example, say the price is $100 and there are 100 shares, then next day the stock splits 2 for 1 so there are 200 shares now. The company is the same, so the price will be half (ie $50).

If your market data does not adjust for these (or allow you to adjust), then these effects will wreck any kind of model you try to build.

Other things you definitely need to be able to do/get: 1)Basket/index/etf compositions. If you're doing any kind of trading of stock etfs, index options/futures etc you need to know what's in the basket and how that changes. This also matters if you're trading things like the russel rebalance, where there is a lot of trading around what stocks go into or out of the indices 2)Calendars for earnings, market holidays etc. You can get this from a third-party source but you definitely need it from somewhere.

Thank you for this feedback as well! Our data definitely accounts for splits and dividends! Dividend history data, as well as ETF's like you mentioned are two things definitely on our list to add immediately.

I'm not sure I completely got your explanation of the dividend effect on stock price. A company's cash in hand is not a part of its stock price. It contributes to sentiment on the stock, but is not part of the stock price itself. I could be wrong. The dividend payout does not come from stock price, it comes from revenue and profit, no? And isn't a dividend a testimony to profitability of company?

Yes to all of your questions. But the point is on day zero (technically the last "cum dividend" day) you get the stock plus the right to receive a dividend the next day, and on day zero + one (the first "ex dividend" day) you don't get the right to the dividend, but everyone who was a holder yesterday gets the dividend. So the stock price drops by the amount of the dividend.

Thank you for the feedback!

Looks nice! But a custom error page concealing then technical error would be a good idea: https://www.styvio.com/api/spy

Yes absolutely, been scrambling to get that done asap!

Why does SPY return an error? Are ETFs not supported?

Yeah no ETF's yet. So sorry :( That is absolutely something we are scrambling to add to the API as soon as possible, as well as options data.

If you provide historical options data that would be amazing.

That's the plan! We have it all in our database, just working on adding as much data as possible to the front end site / app as well as the API!

When I visit that it returns the MSFT ticker info...

Edit: Seems to be returning random tickers -- maybe those within SPY.

why is there so little info on their site?

I'm tempted to use a throwaway email to see what is it because from their landing page there's very little that would make me trust them, specially when I know how expensive that data traditionally is.

How can you provide it for free? how "real time" it is? Where is the data coming from? NASDAQ? a broker?

I'm quite curious but the sparsity of the site makes me dubious

Yes, its comming from NASDAQ and the NYSE. Your welcome to try the API endpoint at https://www.styvio.com/api/aapl with no signup required!

I don't see a TOS page on the site. Where is its (corporation?) owner domiciled? I can appreciate the hustle of bootstrapping a site, but how can anyone know the site has appropriate redistribution agreements in place with those exchanges? Can you cite feed and/or entitlement names that you are redistributing from NASDAQ for example? I wouldn't want to invest time writing against an API that could get shutdown without warning due to misuse of an upstream source.

When it can't match the ticker from request, it returns randomly selected from {FB, TSLA, AAL, AAPL, MSFT}

https://www.styvio.com/api/nada

Thanks for pointing that out. Would you mind expanding a little into the real time aspect of the API?

Does that includes order and Level 2?

Not yet, we are currently in the process of adding those features, as well as dark pool order data, and options data!

Where are you getting dark pools from? That’s usually intentionally not publicly visible.

It is visible a day or two after, and FINRA provides an API to access the data. We plan on working with FINRA to add dark pool data to our API and visualizer tools.

Oh that's interesting, I'll have to take a look. So far most of what I want is available from TD Ameritrade's API, which while it isn't pretty, it does work pretty well.

What’s the gotcha? Other services can charge almost thousands of dollars a month.

The "gotcha" is we plan on creating a subscription service for unrelated services, like algorithmic prediction analysis on our chart visualization pages.

https://www.styvio.com/api/ shows a Django debug page. Launching this way is pretty ridiculous, and persisting after several hours is worse.

I will probably try and take advantage of this API, but I would want a list function of some sort to know what stocks are available. How do I know what's going up / down or sentiment is rising / falling without knowing where to look?

Did you recently get that domain? Wanted to check it out but my university has it blocked citing malware. So maybe something you'd want to look into.

I guess it's data for the day only, not hourly? I had this virtual world idea, and wanted to make a parody virtual college in it in the future haha. one of the things I was thinking is having a ticker in the business school part of the project or some newsfeeds.

I’ve been using IEX Cloud for a while now and it’s becoming clear that if I want to productise the tool I’ve made then I could be on the hook for a decent sized (not massive but not nothing) monthly bill based on their confusing messages system.

If real this would be great, but it’s not giving me a lot of information right now. I’m assuming no international markets?

Book marked to return to.

Yes I completely apologize, international stocks is definitely something we are lacking. As of now it is entirely NYSE and NASDAQ data. Also, if you want to test out the JSON API without logging in, test it out here: https://www.styvio.com/api/aapl

The prices don't seem up to date.. Check $FB for instance, shows 349.27, when in reality it closed at 350.42.

I think this is great. I don't need a stock API yet but I'll keep this in mind for the future. As others have said, more info on the site would be great, but it seems like this is just getting started, so I'm assuming we're looking at the first alpha version of this.

Exactly! Thank you so much for this feedback your completely correct here.

As far as your platform, if you can mirror TradingView's charting ability as the base and then add cool features on top of it, that will generate a lot of interest. What data feed(s) are you providing access to? Cboe BZX?

That's the vision! And we are providing NASDAQ as well as NYSE quotes! We hope to get CBOE data soon, as that has been requested by a ton of people!

Hey, this looks pretty neat. You even have some financials data. I see that all the financials data is in terms of “growth,” is there any chance you could expose the raw numbers? Also, cash flow? Emphasis on free cash flow.

Yes cashflow should definitely be added! That's an amazing idea. If you hover over the growth charts it should show the actual values!

Thanks, what about getting historical values from the API? It’d be very nice to get more historical data from the fianancial statements

Looks really promising. Thanks for sharing. I'd like to mess around with testing trading ideas some time.

What stops me from just scraping your whole dataset?

Absolutely nothing, and we encourage you to do so! Build your own products with our data and monetize it how you see fit, no credit to Styvio required. We are developers first so do with our data what you want. We plan on making revenue by offering premium services to non-developers who simply want to use our charting and sentiment features. The API is a nice gesture to users.

That's highly unlikely. Data brokers that lend out data to you from exchanges make sure end users are just retail and make you sign a bunch of forms just to access basic lit pool data.

Wow, that's awesome! Best of luck to you.

What is the highest resolution intraday data you offer thought the API, one minute? How many months/years back do you allow users to poll? Do you allow users to poll data between specific dates? Is the data an aggregation of all trading venues or only data from one venue?

Where does the data come from? How often is it updated?

Our database is updated around every 10 minutes for intraday data, once a day for everything else (yearly prices, news, fundamentals)

Since there are quality differences between data providers, it would be good to know where you source the data from. Is it from Yahoo Finance (just for example)? Or is it really directly from Nasdaq (which I presume would be pretty costly, and thus raises the question on how long you'll be able to run this service for free before shutting down or having to raise prices).

This is important since if someone decides to fully build on top of your API, they don't want the service to be gone in a few months and waste all the time integrating with yours.

That is precisely my question too. Who or what provides the source-data?

Ideally market-data should be freely available to everyone. I understand it is an expense to provide such data. But it could be mandated by law that anybody operating a stock exchange should provide that data for free, to guarantee efficient markets.

There is no info at all about the features, what it is etc unless apparently you sign up. Why even bother, use another service which is open and good like Polygon.io where its easier.

An 'API' targeted at developers full of marketing buzzwords it just seems like the wrong audience - even if its free.

You have to signup to Polygon too to get an API key though?

How to use it, what it is in full detail is documented well and free. You sign up for the API key, not to view docs. i.e its not a sales funnel for people who arent interested

Also pretty sure you need to account for when you distribute the data, do you have the full rights to redistribute this data legally?

How do you prevent abuse and limit the call rate if you don't require an API key? Even with IP-based limits, I could programmatically pipe my calls through Tor.

What are people’s recommendations for data that covers both US and UK markets?

Does it also provide commodities futures or spot prices?

Nice product!

Do you offer (or plan to offer) historical data?

Thank you so much and yes we do! If you check out the API: https://www.styvio.com/api/aapl and scroll down a bit, there is price arrays for daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and all time values. We are definitely planning on adding bid/ask in the future as well!

Ok I see now, thanks!

This is seriously so sick!

Thank you so much!

chat, fundamental and technical data? lol

how about bid, ask, l2 book and nbbo

How did this land on the front page?

:( Because the API is super helpful for a lot of people!

It got upvotes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com