YahooFinance with Tablesaw (Java) and Google Colab
Yahoo Finance has been a great source for news, stock analysis, portfolio management, & a wide range of financial data sets. The free version provides access to up to 5 years of financial statements (cash flow, income & balance sheet statements), as well as current & historical stock prices. A paid membership for Yahoo Finance Plus gives you up to 30 years of the same data, access to more exclusive analysis, including research reports from Morningstar & Argus, freedom from ads, and many other features packaged in two separate products (essential & lite).
A while back, Yahoo Finance had one of the most popular free APIs for accessing financial data. Since those APIs were retired, several libraries have adapted a ‘screen scraping’ approach to extracting data available for free, including up to 5 years of historical prices, financial statements, etc.
yfinance (Python)
yahoo_finance (Rust)
finance-go (Go)
basic_yahoo_finance (Ruby)
yahoofinance-api (Java)
Finance Quotes API for Yahoo Finance (Java )
In this article, we’re going to focus on the Java library (yahoofinance-api) made available on GitHub by Stijn Strickx. The yahoofinance-api library is open sourced under the MIT License. If this article inspires interest in contributing to the work started by Stijn, I highly recommend reading up on the repository’s posted issues, getting more familiar with the code, and contributing to the project by solving an outstanding issue or adding some small feature. To learn more about contributing to Open Source projects, I recommend reading opensource.guide/how-to-contribute.
Java, Jupyter & Google Colab
To illustrate the use of the yahoofinance-api, we’re going to leverage the IJava Kernel for Jupyter & Google Colab.
Although using Java on Google Colab may not have been the first approach to come to mind, Google Colab can be an excellent environment to share all sorts of code for instructional or referential purposes. Using Java with Google Colab is possible with the help of several community driven efforts, including the IJava Kernel for Jupyter written by Spencer Park.
Before completing this tutorial, it helps to be familiar with the steps for configuring and installing a kernel on Google Colab, as demonstrated in several of the articles linked below.
