Data, data, everywhere…

The biggest issue we face when putting together SI:REDUX is getting hold of quality stock market data that we can legally use at an affordable price. Initially we were hoping that the EU’s MiFID II directive would be useful to us here. MiFID II requires financial markets to make delayed stock market data available free of charge (see for example Euronext’s implementation). Unfortunately although this data is technically available very few places (if any) are making it available in an easily usable format and none that we can find allow automatic download of the data.

So, we needed to look elsewhere and found IEX Cloud (full disclosure: this is our affiliate link to IEX Cloud, if you follow this link and sign up for IEX Cloud we will receive a credit on our account to help fund SI:REDUX). IEX Cloud does almost everything we need for SI:REDUX – it provides fast, easy access to a wealth of financial data in a machine-readable format (JSON) through its API. The only drawback is that full data is only available for securities traded on US exchanges which doesn’t fit perfectly with the UK school day. Since it does provide out of hours trading prices though we are confident that we can provide a great, educational game featuring a number of well-known US stocks.

Credits

Featured image by Digital Buggu from Pexels