Freely Available Financial Data

Have you heard the phrase "Data is cheap"? Well, that may be true on average, but good sources are hard to find for free in finance. There are many paid options ranging from a few dollars per month to thousands of dollars per year. When you don't have the money to shell out to get a DataStream subscription or a Bloomberg Terminal, it can be frustrating finding the data that you need. I've compiled a list here of freely available sources of financial and economic data that I frequently use in my own work.

YAHOO FINANCE

Yahoo Finance is a great place to go for historical stock data. The best part, in my opinion, about Yahoo Finance is using the URL to download stock prices into a CSV file. 

GOOGLE FINANCE

Google Finance is very similar to Yahoo Finance in regard to what data is available. I think Google does a good job of letting you compare a company's chart against its competitors though. Potentially a little easier to use and more appealing, but I'm not really concerned with petty things like that when I'm hunting for data.

FRED

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains a huge database of economic data called FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data). This is my first choice when looking for anything financial or economic related that is on a macro level. The FRED Excel Add-in makes it super easy to download data series as well.

QUANDL

Quandl is something I've just recently stumbled upon. Its website currently states that it has over 10 million free data series available for download. The interface is easy to use. There are also a number of packages to make it easy to connect with statistical languages like R and MATLAB.

FINRA

Looking for fixed income data has always frustrated me. FINRA is one place that has bond data available. Unfortunately, there is no super simple way to get the trade history for a bond because they don't provide download links. This can be useful when examining corporate bonds.

FINVIZ

If I'm just looking at price charts, FINVIZ is my first choice. It has a great stock screener allowing you to screen by many different things including fundamentals, technicals, patterns, and trends.

These are my favorite free data sources, but of course there are many more out there. I consider these to be reliable sources, both in terms of availability and legitimacy. For many common projects, these sources should be enough to satisfy your needs.