> Wall Street firms get financial feeds from zacks, edgars, morningstar and a whole slew of other financial data providers. Finance sites, like yahoo finance al

> Wall Street firms get financial feeds from zacks, edgars, morningstar and a whole slew of other financial data providers. Finance sites, like yahoo finance also get their data from these sources. They don't have to scrape anything for data. It comes in structured CSV, XML, etc format already. Data quality varies from vendor to vendor. Additionally, speed is a factor in how profitably some strategies can be executed. When firms are examining bits on the wire to guess whether earnings were good or not (before the full headline arrives), you can’t necessarily wait for the vendors to update their releases, especially since all of your competitors will have exactly the same data.