More problems with Finance::Quote Yahoo Europe feed?

[Dave Reiser]

Conor O'Neill wrote:
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> 
> Thanks for this.
> 
> However, all we're actually doing is chasing around in circles every
> time someone twitches one of these web pages. There must be a better way.
> 
> I can't believe that there isn't a proper _web service_ available
> somewhere which can provide stock prices and/or fund prices. It is the
> canonical example which is always supplied when starting work on web
> services. This would avoid the perpetual chasing of every minor adjustment.
> 
> I have looked for one myself, but never found any documented web service
> available. But there must be one out there? It doesn't have to be an
> up-to-the-minute feed; one of the 20-minute delayed feeds would be fine,
> or even just a feed which gives daily closing prices.
> 
> Then, presumably, there could be a separate module within Finance::Quote
> which would access this web service directly, instead of screen-scraping
> off a web page.
> 
> Is this really too much to ask?
> 
Yes.

Every one of the web sites showing quotes has a revenue stream 
supporting it. Finance-quote users represent zero contribution to any of 
those streams. Most of the money streams for public sites are ad 
revenue, but we're not ever seeing the ads.

The idea of a grand unification of any kind of data is always logically 
seductive, but almost always way too expensive to implement practically. 
Just in the US, you'd have to deal with the oddities presented by NYSE, 
AMEX, and NASDAQ -- and I suspect each of those has either paying or 
reciprocal data sharing agreements with a number of data providers for 
some aspect of their datasets. Everyone who imagines that they add value 
wants to get paid, and paid a lot.

A finance-quote module developer once got a letter threatening legal 
action against him because the 'provider' insisted that screen scraping 
of a publicly accessible web page was a violation of their terms of 
service. It's hard to believe that publicly posted information can be 
legally restricted, but do you want to pay the legal fees to fight that 
action?

BTW, Yahoo quotes are not done by screen scraping. Yahoo_* support a 
database back end query for historical data. So while I'm frustrated by 
Yahoo's changing and inconsistent-across-geographic-regions service, it 
is still a really good deal. Some of those inconsistencies arise because 
different financial markets see no reason to try for world-wide 
agreement. Perhaps the advent of the Euro pushed the move toward ISIN 
use instead of existing fund ticker symbols. I doubt the US would agree 
to that switch ('our symbols work fine for us...'). And on it goes.

Maybe we'll get lucky and Google will decide consolidate access to the 
data in a parsable way.

Dave
-- 
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net