

Despite the fact that the Yahoo Finance API is no longer available, many independent algotraders, finance students, and retail traders continue to scour the web in search of it - which is why we’ve created this blog post - to help you understand the pros and cons of using it. It was the first stock market API that was widely reverse-engineered and available for free on the internet. This makes it impossible to query the Yahoo Finance API without having previously navigated to the Yahoo Finance website, which is why a screen scraping strategy has been employed by so many programmers who are looking to get around Yahoo’s restrictions. The new version of the Yahoo Finance API will check to see if you have a cookie present on your system from navigating the website. The API was public and anyone could query it. In fact, you didn’t even need a Yahoo account or need to be signed-in to Yahoo to use the API. The API was designed to be used internally among Yahoo’s own properties and was never officially published for external use. The official Yahoo Finance API was shut down by Yahoo in 2017 due to widespread abuse against their terms of service. If you need real-time data and don’t want to hassle with screen scraping or proxies, it could just be easier to purchase an API subscription with a low-cost provider such as Market Data. None of these packages or services will help you solve the issues related to the data quality: delayed or missing data. There are even several open source packages that will help resourceful programmers who are willing to put in some extra effort and a paid service from Rapid API that will handle the scraping and proxying for you. If you don’t mind screen scraping and have the technical ability to use rotating proxies, there are ways to use the Yahoo Finance API today for free. The Yahoo Finance API continues to be used in 2023, even after it was shut down by the company.
