Analyzing Historical Stock Data: Unveiling the Secrets of Market Trends
Nowadays, people resort to many investment methods for their present and future. Like buying valuable currencies, gold, and cryptocurrencies. However, the most popular way preferred by millions of people around the world for years is to buy stocks. Today, many platforms offer thousands of live and historical stock data to their users around the world and also offer the opportunity to trade with this data. The most important feature of these platforms is to offer free historical stock data to their users.
Free historical stock data is the historical data of stocks up to a certain date. The best practice way for platforms to obtain both live and historical stock data for thousands of stocks today is to use a market data API. Good market data APIs have been developed to provide high-accuracy market data to businesses within seconds. So why is historical stock data so important? First, let’s find an answer to this question and then take a look at how we can obtain historical stock data from a popular market data API.
Contents
Why is Historical Stock Data Important?
These data play a critical role when making strategic decisions and investing in stocks, which are one of the cornerstones of the financial world. Historical stock data is an indispensable resource for both individual investors and large institutional players and has many important uses.
Importance
- Trend Analysis: Historical stock data is an important aid in predicting future trends by examining price movements in past periods. This helps both businesses and investors shape their investment strategies with accurate data.
- Risk Assessment: Conducting risk analysis based on historical data allows businesses to better understand potential financial risks. This can help improve risk mitigation and portfolio diversification strategies.
- Decision-Making Processes: Businesses can directly use historical stock data when making strategic decisions. For example, past fluctuations in a company’s stock price can influence decisions about launching a new product or a merger.
- Portfolio Management: Investment professionals optimize client portfolios using historical stock data. This helps investors achieve certain investment goals.
Usage Areas
- Investment Strategies: Financial institutions, investment funds, and individual investors determine the most appropriate investment strategies by analyzing historical stock data. This data directly guides their trading decisions.
- Risk Management: Insurance companies and financial institutions create risk management strategies using historical stock data. This helps minimize possible damage.
- Company Performance Monitoring: In particular, companies can use historical stock data to evaluate their performance. The past performance of stock prices allows the company to evaluate its strategic goals.
- Training and Simulations: Historical stock data is used in financial training and investment simulations. This is the most valuable resource to help new investors gain experience.
- News and Event Analysis: Historic stock data is used to examine the effects of important past events and news on stock prices. This helps in understanding market movements and reacting to future events.
How to Get Historical Stock Data with an API?
In this section, we will see how we can obtain historical stock data within seconds from a market data API that provides international services such as Uber, Amazon, and Accenture. The market data API we will use is the marketstack API.
The marketstack API is a very popular market data API with more than 30,000 active customers. It supports more than 70 global exchanges globally with high accuracy. Additionally, 170,000+ stock tickers and 750+ market indices are among the services it offers to its users. With the global data it provides, it enables thousands of businesses to access international stock data in the fastest and most accurate way.
One of the most important features of this API is that it provides historical stock data. It has a scalable structure that can provide up to 30 years of historical data of stock tickers quickly and free of charge. To obtain the historical stock data it provides, let’s first sign up for the free subscription plan it offers and obtain an API key.
After obtaining the API key, let’s put the following endpoint in a browser or an API testing tool such as Postman, put our API key in the ‘YOUR-ACCESS-KEY’ field, and send an HTTP GET request:
| http://api.marketstack.com/v1/eod?access_key=YOUR-ACCESS-KEY&symbols=AAPL&date_from=2023-01-07&date_to=2023-01-12 |
With this endpoint, we will obtain the stock data of the ‘APPL’ stock ticker in January 2023. The response of this endpoint is as follows:
| { “pagination”: { “limit”: 100, “offset”: 0, “count”: 4, “total”: 4 }, “data”: [ { “open”: 133.88, “high”: 134.26, “low”: 131.44, “close”: 133.41, “volume”: 71326100.0, “adj_high”: 134.26, “adj_low”: 131.44, “adj_close”: 133.41, “adj_open”: 133.88, “adj_volume”: 71379648.0, “split_factor”: 1.0, “dividend”: 0.0, “symbol”: “AAPL”, “exchange”: “XNAS”, “date”: “2023-01-12T00:00:00+0000” }, { “open”: 131.25, “high”: 133.51, “low”: 130.46, “close”: 133.49, “volume”: 69359700.0, “adj_high”: 133.51, “adj_low”: 130.46, “adj_close”: 133.49, “adj_open”: 131.25, “adj_volume”: 69458949.0, “split_factor”: 1.0, “dividend”: 0.0, “symbol”: “AAPL”, “exchange”: “XNAS”, “date”: “2023-01-11T00:00:00+0000” }, { “open”: 130.26, “high”: 131.26, “low”: 128.12, “close”: 130.73, “volume”: 63803400.0, “adj_high”: 131.2636, “adj_low”: 128.12, “adj_close”: 130.73, “adj_open”: 130.26, “adj_volume”: 63896155.0, “split_factor”: 1.0, “dividend”: 0.0, “symbol”: “AAPL”, “exchange”: “XNAS”, “date”: “2023-01-10T00:00:00+0000” }, { “open”: 130.47, “high”: 133.41, “low”: 129.89, “close”: 130.15, “volume”: 70675200.0, “adj_high”: 133.41, “adj_low”: 129.89, “adj_close”: 130.15, “adj_open”: 130.465, “adj_volume”: 70790813.0, “split_factor”: 1.0, “dividend”: 0.0, “symbol”: “AAPL”, “exchange”: “XNAS”, “date”: “2023-01-09T00:00:00+0000” } ] } |
Conclusion
To sum up, analyzing historical stock data easily opens the doors for businesses and investors to discover the secrets of market trends. This data easily helps them evaluate future investment opportunities, reduce risks, and make strategic decisions by examining past price movements. These data, which are of critical importance for both individual investors and institutional players in the financial world, are the most valuable source for understanding the complexity of the markets.
FAQs
Q: What are the Use Cases of Historical Stock Data?
A: Historical stock data has many different uses for users, from financial analysis to risk management, and investment strategies to company valuation. This data helps investors and businesses analyze past market movements to predict future trends, assess risks, and support their decisions. They also use this data for many different purposes, such as optimizing stock portfolios and performing technical, and fundamental analysis.
Q: Is the marketstack a Free Historical Stock Data API?
A: Yes, it is. This API has a free plan that offers 1,000 API calls per month for free.
Q: How Many Stock Tickers Does the marketstack API Support?
A: The marketstack API supports more than 170,000 stock tickers globally.
Q: How Many Years Does the marketstack API Provide Historical Stock Data?
A: The marketstack API provides historical stock data for more than 30 years.
