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How to get a complete list of ticker symbols from Yahoo Finance?

Asked 2011-03-09T14:00:29.163
117

I've googled endlessly for a method of getting a complete (and daily updated) list of all Yahoo ticker symbols available through http://finance.yahoo.com

Yahoo has information for stocks, futures etc for a lot of exchanges worldwide, and I'd like a combined list of all the ticker symbols available through them. I've tried YQL but they have a "where symbol = (or in)" clause restriction so I cannot select * from symbols.

So basically, getting detailed information for a single symbol or several symbols at one time is easy but I just can't seem to find out how to get a list of all available tickers.

Can anyone help, please?

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2 Answers

44

I managed to do something similar by using this URL:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.industry%20where%20id%20in%20(select%20industry.id%20from%20yahoo.finance.sectors)&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys

It downloads a complete list of stock symbols using the Yahoo YQL API, including the stock name, stock symbol, and industry ID. What it doesn't seem to have is any sort of stock symbol modifiers. E.g. for Rogers Communications Inc, it only downloads RCI, not RCI-A.TO, RCI-B.TO, etc. I haven't found a source for that information yet - if anyone knows of a way to automate downloading that, I'd like to hear it. Also, it'd be nice to find a way to download some sort of relation between the stock symbol and the exchange it's traded on, since some are traded on multiple exchanges, or maybe I only want to look at stuff on the TSX or something.

answered 2013-05-03T13:29:18.337
14

There is a nice C# wrapper for the Yahoo.Finance API at http://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-managed/ that will get you there. Unfortunately there is no direct way to download the ticker list but the following creates the list by iterating through the alphabetical groups:

        AlphabeticIDIndexDownload dl1 = new AlphabeticIDIndexDownload();
        dl1.Settings.TopIndex = null;
        Response<AlphabeticIDIndexResult> resp1 = dl1.Download();

        writeStream.WriteLine("Id|Isin|Name|Exchange|Type|Industry");

        foreach (var alphabeticalIndex in resp1.Result.Items)
        {
            AlphabeticalTopIndex topIndex = (AlphabeticalTopIndex) alphabeticalIndex;
            dl1.Settings.TopIndex = topIndex;
            Response<AlphabeticIDIndexResult> resp2 = dl1.Download();

            foreach (var index in resp2.Result.Items)
            {
                IDSearchDownload dl2 = new IDSearchDownload();
                Response<IDSearchResult> resp3 = dl2.Download(index);


                int i = 0;
                foreach (var item in resp3.Result.Items)
                {
                    writeStream.WriteLine(item.ID + "|" + item.ISIN + "|" + item.Name + "|" + item.Exchange + "|" + item.Type + "|" + item.Industry);
                }

            }
        }

It gave me a list of about 75,000 securities in about 4 mins.

answered 2012-11-03T01:31:40.323

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