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I spent the entire day yesterday trying to set up some automated monitoring of my investments, only to discover most UK market information is locked behind stup
by monooso 4mo ago
I spent the entire day yesterday trying to set up some automated monitoring of my investments, only to discover most UK market information is locked behind stupid-money APIs.
Anything that improves that situation is a positive.
- inigyou 4mo agoThat's normal in markets and it even makes sense. Think about it: shouldn't the market be funded by charging fees to the extremely wealthy participants? The alternative is that it's taxpayer funded, which is a tax subsidy to extremely wealthy participants.
- dv_dt 4mo agoSeems like a bit of a false dichotomy- other alternatives are regulatory requirements or taxes that force or allow the api to be provisioned
- inigyou 4mo agoYou can force markets to make an open API funded by participants, but you can't make it fully open (open API and open participation) if you don't want tax funding because then there's no funding source left. Maybe you decide a fully open market is worth being tax funded, though it's still mostly going to benefit very rich people.
- dv_dt 4mo agoWhy is "no tax funding" a hard requirement? I would think the lowest cost to get that market information publicly shared and forthcoming (and thus increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the market), would be for a government dept to operate the frontend distribution, but require regulatory submissions of transaction data within reasonable latency windows. It's just a modern form of say US SEC document submissions and EDGAR to distribute.
- inigyou 4mo agoIt's because why should taxes fund things that benefit rich people? It's not far off from taxes funding the caviar at Davos.
- Closi 4mo agoI don't see why you can't do that? There's plenty of things that cost money that legislation forces companies to do anyway, regardless of if there is a 'funding source' or not. Although this particular one is from the FCA so presumably is taxpayer funded anyway.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 1234letshaveatw 4mo agoOnly the extremely wealthy participate in the UK? That is most certainly not the case in the US, where your average salaried employee has most of their retirement invested in the market
- infecto 4mo agoEhh to be clear even in the US certain markets like bonds are not always that transparent.
- macleginn 4mo agoThey normally don't do self-set-up real-time monitoring though.
- inigyou 4mo agoOnly extremely wealthy people participate in stock markets, in general. Other people use one of those wealthy people as an intermediary. To participate directly in a market you usually need to lock up at least several million dollars at what is effectively an escrow service, so they can shift it between accounts when transactions happen. All your shares stay locked up in a similar service. The line graph of stock prices you can see on Google is a lie. Real market data is, like, a live feed of who's buying and selling and at what price and quantity. That doesn't seem very useful to someone who isn't trying to trade on that market, and if you can't trade on that market why bother getting the data? There also isn't just one market. Any two large financial firms can just agree to directly trade with each other, would you mandate realtime data on that?
- monooso 4mo agoSeveral such APIs include the equivalent data for US markets in their free tier, for personal use.
- doikor 4mo agoMost if not all stock markets are for profit corporations making a lot of profit. They could have api fees at 0 and still make a profit.
- dismalaf 4mo agoIf it's just for personal use see if your bank/broker has an API for market information. Most do even if it's not advertised. Also some resellers of market information are pretty affordable for personal use.