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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doikor 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Most 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.

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dv_dt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | 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 2 hours 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.

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dv_dt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	inigyou 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's because why should taxes fund things that benefit rich people? It's not far off from taxes funding the caviar at Davos.

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Closi 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I 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.

	▲	inigyou 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well if you mandate they spend money and also mandate they don't get money, they'll shut down.

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monooso 2 hours 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 2 hours 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

	▲	inigyou 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Only 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?
	▲	macleginn 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		They normally don't do self-set-up real-time monitoring though.
	▲	infecto 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ehh to be clear even in the US certain markets like bonds are not always that transparent.