The LSE Directory / Data providers
Yahoo Finance is a financial news and market data website, launched January 19, 1997 as part of Yahoo Inc. It provides free real time and delayed stock quotes, interactive charts, historical price downloads, portfolio tracking, a stock screener, an economic and earnings calendar, and financial news and video content covering equities, ETFs, options, futures, bonds, currencies and cryptocurrencies. Yahoo switched its market data feed from Reuters to direct exchange feeds in 2005, added interactive charting in 2006, and began offering free real time quotes in 2008. Its core differentiation from professional data vendors in this directory is that it is a free, advertising-supported consumer portal rather than a licensed institutional feed; depth and order book data, tick history and machine readable delivery are not part of its free product. Yahoo layered three paid tiers on top of the free site, Bronze, Silver and Gold, adding premium portfolio tools, stock ratings and research, an ad-free newsfeed, premium charting and screeners, and, on the Gold tier, up to 40 years of historical financial data. Yahoo's official public market data API was discontinued years ago; the widely used "yfinance" Python library that many retail developers and hobbyist quant projects rely on today is an unofficial, unaffiliated tool that calls the same front end endpoints the finance.yahoo.com website uses and periodically breaks when Yahoo changes its site. Yahoo Finance has been ranked the number one financial news and research site by Comscore every year since 2008 and reports roughly 150 million monthly active users as of April 2024. Yahoo itself was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo; Verizon Communications bought Yahoo's core internet business in 2017, and private equity firm Apollo Global Management completed a roughly five billion dollar purchase of Yahoo from Verizon in September 2021, with Apollo taking a 90 percent stake and Verizon retaining 10 percent. In August 2023, under Yahoo Finance general manager Tapan Bhat, Yahoo acquired Commonstock, a social platform letting retail investors share insights tied to their brokerage accounts, its first acquisition under Yahoo Finance's own brand since the Apollo deal, folding Commonstock's team and product into Yahoo Finance's free and subscription offering. Since the 2021 Apollo buyout, Yahoo has concentrated investment on its highest traffic media properties, with Yahoo Finance singled out alongside Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Mail; the site underwent a redesign in 2023 as part of that push to build out its retail investor community features.
