Pulling Data From Another Website

[ryanmetzler3]

There was a guy named Benjamin Graham who was a pioneer of investing in the market. He has a formula that is still widely used today to find undervalued stocks. I would like to create a site that you simply enter the ticker symbol of a stock and it calculates the "value" for you.

 

You need expected 5 years growth, earnings per share, and aaa corporate bond yield. Yahoo finance has all these numbers readily available. Is it possible to write a program that would receive the ticker symbol then pull that data from yahoo and run it through the code? Or do I pretty much need my own DB of info on every stock out there?

[KevinM1]

Have you checked to see if they (Yahoo! Finance) have an API or some other feed you can hook into?

[ryanmetzler3]

I have not, I really did not have the slightest clue how you could accomplish something like this. I am on Yahoo's API site right now but they don't give an explanation to what it really is. Can you tell me real quick just a basic summary of what it is and how it works? 

 

I'd be very appreciative 

[jcbones]

An "API" is an Application Programming Interface, and is used to provide all data that you need to do any task you wish (inside of the sites TOS) with data from that specific site.  Most sites provide one so that you don't eat up bandwidth by scraping the site, as API's generally only return the specified data that you need.

 

How an API returns data is pretty site specific.  Most return in a JSON, XML, or CSV format, but many can return in any format you wish.

 

Yahoo finance API code is listed at:

http://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-managed/wiki/YahooFinanceAPIs