Stock quotations as input for your Spring Integration App

Summary

As you might know Google deprecated its Google Finance API some time ago and other options such as Yahoo Finance API do not seem to work when dealing with Stocks outside the US (i.e. Spanish stocks are not supported).

So here I found an option of getting Stock prices by means of using a Google Spreadsheet as a source of information. Later on, we will consume this source of information with Spring Integration.

Creating and publishing your Google Spreadsheet containing stock quotations

If you are familiar with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you will know for sure how simple is to create such documents, so I will omit the creation of the spreadsheet for the sake of clarity.

We will use the function GOOGLEFINANCE to retrieve the prices and timestamp of a number of stocks (there are many more features, you can see full function documentation is Google Spreadsheets) using three columns:

• Column A: Stock ticker
• Column B: Price
• The ticket will be taken from column A
• =GOOGLEFINANCE($A1)
• Column C:
• Last trade dateThe ticket will be taken from column A
• =GOOGLEFINANCE($A1;"tradetime")

With this setup, you will be able to write in column A as much stocks as you want and extend the formula to create a table. See this example (all but one are spanish stocks, OHI trades in the NYSE, note that for today we still don´t have a quotation).

Publish your sheet

Just go to File... Publish in the Web... and choose which sheets you want to publish and CSV format as output (of the formats available is the easiest by far to read later on by our application).

Check out this example here.

Next steps

After this simple set up, you will have a simple source of information with the stock parameters we need. In the next article, we will start building our Spring application (using Boot and Integration) to consume this source of data, store and analyze it.

Bear in mind that this free stock data is not suitable for automatic trading as it is not 100% reliable and usually come with a delay of around 20 minutes.

Update

This article refers to getting "live" stock data (i.e. delayed by 20 minutes). If you are also interested in getting historical stock data, Yahoo finance is still a good choice for you.  See this other article with more information on how to query the API provided by Yahoo Finance.