I have been looking for a while at how to retrieve financial quotes in c#, in this case, Canadian mutual funds.
It seems there are 2 main sources of information for this, Yahoo and Google! Also there seems to be 2 preferred methods, API and HTML scrapping. My preference would be for an API method, but I am open to any suggestion.
I have found the Yahoo api to be very nice to use, however although it works for stocks like “MSFT” it fails to retrieve the data for mutual funds like “RBCCANADIANI.TO”. For some reason this symbol only works on the web site itself.
Google’s API seems to requires to have a portfolio set up and login in order to retrieve quotes, I would prefer to avoid logins and use a completly opened api if possible.
HTML scraping introduce a totally new set of complications, asking the user to locate on an html page where the price is and such. Note that Google’s html (http://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF_CA:RBF556) returns the right page, but a look at the html source shows that the price is not in an easily identifiable tag (id not set!).
Has anybody tried similar things, I have the feeling I am missing something here 🙂
Many thanks
If you are looking for pricing data I would suggest a service like IQFeed. I have used them as a client for some time and they do have mutual fund data (although I don’t use it). If you don’t want to pay for it you will probably have to scrape it.