When it comes to investing in the stock market, the first investment instrument that comes to everyone’s mind is stocks. Stocks are the name given to the securities issued by capital companies to their partners to document their shares and partnerships. In other words, it is also seen as one of the equivalent parts of a company’s capital. Nowadays, stock investments are increasing day by day. The importance of historical stock data in stock investments is indisputable. Platforms that offer stock transactions to their users usually also receive historical stock data from the stock APIs they use.
Historical stock data refers to the changes in stocks in past years. Almost every stock API today provides this valuable data. However, the accuracy of this data is very important. Therefore, the APIs that provide this data must be reliable and provide accurate data. In this article, we will first talk about the importance of accurate historical stock prices and their use cases. Then, we will integrate a reliable historical stock API into the Java programming language.
Why Are Historical Stock Prices Important?
Historical stock prices are an important way to understand a company’s financial performance and overall market conditions. This information is important because it helps investors and businesses make investment decisions, manage their risks, and achieve their financial goals.
There are many use cases for this data today. Some of them are as follows:
- Making Investment Decisions: Historical stock prices help investors and businesses evaluate a company’s long-term performance. This can help them better understand the investment risks and potential returns of target companies.
- Risk Management: Historical stock prices help investors and businesses evaluate companies on the stock market. This enables investors to develop strategies to reduce their risk. For example, if a company’s stock prices have been very volatile recently, it could mean that this company is a risky investment. This information can directly help investors carefully assess the risks before investing in that company.
- Achieving Financial Goals: Historical stock prices, in particular, can directly help investors and businesses estimate the amount of time and money needed to achieve their financial goals. This can help them plan their investments more effectively. For example, if an investor wants to make $200,000 in 5 years, by looking at historical stock prices, they can quickly estimate how much money they need to invest and how long they need to wait to reach that goal.
How to Integrate a Historical Stock Data API Into Java?
In this section, we will integrate the marketstack historical stock data API, which is the most preferred by businesses and developers in the market, into the Java programming language. We will develop the application with Java 21.
There are many reasons why we prefer the marketstack API in this application. The marketstack API is briefly a very popular stock data API used by companies such as Uber, Amazon, and Accenture. This API supports more than 70 global exchanges. It also provides more than 170,000 stock tickers and 750 market indices.
One of the biggest reasons it’s so popular is that it provides up to 30 years of historical data for over 170,000 stocks. And with high accuracy. It is also a free stock data API. It offers its users free usage for up to 1,000 API requests per month.
To integrate and use the marketstack API into the Java programming language, we first need an API key. To get this API key for free, let’s subscribe to the marketstack’s free subscription plan and get an API key.
Next, let’s create a Java application.
Now, let’s put the following codes in the ‘Main’ class of the application we created:
| import java.io.IOException; import java.net.URI; import java.net.http.HttpClient; import java.net.http.HttpRequest; import java.net.http.HttpResponse; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, InterruptedException { HttpClient client = HttpClient.newHttpClient(); HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder() .uri(URI.create(“http://api.marketstack.com/v1/eod?access_key=YOUR-API-KEY&symbols=AAPL&date_from=2023-09-16&date_to=2023-09-26”)) .GET() .build(); HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString()); System.out.println(response.body()); } } |
With this application, we make an API call to the marketstack API using the ‘HttpClient’ class from Java’s HTTP library. With this API call, we will obtain historical data of ‘AAPL’ stock from the marketstack API from 2023-09-16 to 2023-09-26.
After putting our API key in the ‘YOUR-API-KEY’ field and then running the application, the data in the application’s console will be as follows:
Conclusion
In summary, historical stock data is very important for businesses and developers today. This data directly affects their investment strategies and risk management. Although many APIs that provide this data are easily integrated into applications today, APIs that provide incorrect or outdated data can cause financial harm to users. For this reason, the accuracy of the data provided by the APIs that provide this data is very important.
FAQs
Q: What is the Historical Stock Data?
A: Historical stock data refers to the values of a stock in past years. It usually includes the stock’s price, trading volume, and other relevant metrics over a specific period. Historical stock data is important for financial purposes such as investing, assessing risk, and developing strategies.
Q: What are the Popular Usages of the Historical Stock Data?
A: Historical stock data is widely used for financial and investment purposes. Primarily, investors and financial analysts refer to this data to examine a company’s performance and its stock’s past price movements. It is also used to perform risk assessment. Today, historical data is frequently used to develop investment strategies, make trading decisions, and conduct financial research.
Q: Is the marketstack a Free Historical Stock Data API?
A: Yes, it is. It provides 1,000 API requests per month for free with its free subscription plan.
Q: How Many Global Exchanges Does the marketstack API Support?
A: The marketstack API supports more than 70 global exchanges.
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