[GNC-dev] Alpha Vantage as Data Source for Finance::Quote (F::Q)

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 23, 2018, at 6:58 PM, AlphaVantage Support <support at alphavantage.co> wrote:
> 
> Hello Team GnuCash,
> 
> Greetings from Team Alpha Vantage.
> 
> First of all, thank you so much for using Alpha Vantage as a data source
> for the *Finance::Quote (F::Q) *feature in GnuCash. We are thrilled to be
> part of such a groundbreaking project!
> 
> To better serve the GnuCash community, we are happy to provide a generous
> API rate limit for GnuCash users at a significantly discounted price
> compared to that of our standard premium API key
> <https://www.alphavantage.co/premium/>. Our mission is to democratize
> access to financial market data and would be honored to join forces with
> you along the way.
> 
> Could you please kindly advise on how to best relay the information to the
> GnuCash users?

This is a good start, many of them read this list, but we have several lists, see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists>, and of course not all users read any of the lists.

We can easily make an announcement on our website and add instructions to our wiki on how to get “GnuCash pricing”, just reply with the information.

Finance::Quote is actually a perl module available from CPAN and used by a number of FOSS finance projects. You can find its code at https://github.com/finance-quote/finance-quote; you’ll be particularly interested in https://github.com/finance-quote/finance-quote/blob/master/lib/Finance/Quote/AlphaVantage.pm. I’ve copied Erik Colson, the Finance::Quote developer on this reply.

The current way F::Q retrieves quotes from Alpha Vantage isn’t optimal for either end: Because your batch-quote facility is limited to US markets during trading hours he’s using historical quotes, one at a time, and throwing away most of the data since he only wants the latest one. Perhaps if you worked together you could create a custom API to your service that would provide exactly what F::Q needs and associate special F::Q API keys that can access only that API. That would allow you to minimize your expense in supporting F::Q users and dissuade folks who don’t use Finance::Quote from availing themselves of the F::Q discounted price.

Regards,
John Ralls