The Web Is Shifting

Here is another lighting talk I’ve planed to this year Java Posse Roundup. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to give it. So in order to share it with some girls that might find it interesting – Here you go:

The web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14 per cent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent. You may  read more about the fact that Facebook got more unique users in the USA then Google all last week… so it’s clearly the direction that the web is moving. I only wonder, what are people doing all this time on Facebook.

Facebook is like a Starbucks (You know… friends don’t let they friend drink there) where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything. The revenue gap between sites like Facebook and Google should narrow over time.  Cost-per-click search ads are extremely good at harvesting intent, but bad at generating intent.

Yahoo Finance (hidden) API

I was looking for long time after a way to get some finance data from sources like: google, yahoo etc’ without the need to parse long html pages. Than, a friend point me to some simple pipe that fetch this information. From there it was a short step to gain access to this nice (hidden) API was inevitable.

In a nutshell, if you want to get data on some stocks you can use this request:
http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GE+PTR+MSFT&f=snd1l1yr

where some special tags:

a	Ask	a2	Average Daily Volume	a5	Ask Size
b	Bid	b2	Ask (Real-time)	b3	Bid (Real-time)
b4	Book Value	b6	Bid Size	c	Change & Percent Change
c1	Change	c3	Commission	c6	Change (Real-time)
c8	After Hours Change (Real-time)	d	Dividend/Share	d1	Last Trade Date
d2	Trade Date	e	Earnings/Share	e1	Error Indication (returned for symbol changed / invalid)
e7	EPS Estimate Current Year	e8	EPS Estimate Next Year	e9	EPS Estimate Next Quarter
f6	Float Shares	g	Day’s Low	h	Day’s High
j	52-week Low	k	52-week High	g1	Holdings Gain Percent
g3	Annualized Gain	g4	Holdings Gain	g5	Holdings Gain Percent (Real-time)
g6	Holdings Gain (Real-time)	i	More Info	i5	Order Book (Real-time)
j1	Market Capitalization	j3	Market Cap (Real-time)	j4	EBITDA
j5	Change From 52-week Low	j6	Percent Change From 52-week Low	k1	Last Trade (Real-time) With Time
k2	Change Percent (Real-time)	k3	Last Trade Size	k4	Change From 52-week High
k5	Percebt Change From 52-week High	l	Last Trade (With Time)	l1	Last Trade (Price Only)
l2	High Limit	l3	Low Limit	m	Day’s Range
m2	Day’s Range (Real-time)	m3	50-day Moving Average	m4	200-day Moving Average
m5	Change From 200-day Moving Average	m6	Percent Change From 200-day Moving Average	m7	Change From 50-day Moving Average
m8	Percent Change From 50-day Moving Average	n	Name	n4	Notes
o	Open	p	Previous Close	p1	Price Paid
p2	Change in Percent	p5	Price/Sales	p6	Price/Book
q	Ex-Dividend Date	r	P/E Ratio	r1	Dividend Pay Date
r2	P/E Ratio (Real-time)	r5	PEG Ratio	r6	Price/EPS Estimate Current Year
r7	Price/EPS Estimate Next Year	s	Symbol	s1	Shares Owned
s7	Short Ratio	t1	Last Trade Time	t6	Trade Links
t7	Ticker Trend	t8	1 yr Target Price	v	Volume
v1	Holdings Value	v7	Holdings Value (Real-time)	w	52-week Range
w1	Day’s Value Change	w4	Day’s Value Change (Real-time)	x	Stock Exchange
y	Dividend Yield

Simple, right? 🙂

As for historical data you can use something like:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=WU&a=01&b=19&c=2010&d=01&e=19&f=2010&g=d

where the FROM date is: &a=01&b=10&c=2010
and the TO date is: &d=01&e=19&f=2010
You can also get it as CSV file with link like:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=WU&a=01&b=19&c=2010&d=01&e=19&f=2010&g=d&ignore=.csv

Now, if you want to play with the data you are getting from yahoo! you can run some fun SQL like:

Getting the Standard divination of a specific stock:

SELECT stock, STD(Close-Price) from `historic_prices` where stock = "NFLX" AND date > "2010-01-01" group by stock

This will give you the Standard divination on Netflix (hot hot stock these days) from the beginning of 2010 (and like the meaning of the universe… it’s 42!)

Here is another way to work with finance data from NodeJS.

Happy hacking!