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.

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inigyou an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That'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.

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dv_dt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like a bit of a false dichotomy- other alternatives are regulatory requirements or taxes that force or allow the api to be provisioned

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inigyou an hour ago | parent [-]

You 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 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why 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.

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monooso 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Several such APIs include the equivalent data for US markets in their free tier, for personal use.

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1234letshaveatw an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Only 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 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ehh to be clear even in the US certain markets like bonds are not always that transparent.

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dismalaf 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If 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.