For many years numerous Python textbook examples have used the Yahoo Finance API as a data source for stock information. With Yahoo's abrupt end to this free service earlier this year, people have been forced to turn elsewhere for free and easily accessible sources of stock price data. Data source such as Google Finance and libraries like pandas_datareader are filling the gap, but functionality is often limited to American stock markets, or locked behind API access keys. This talk aims to discuss this changing landscape and discuss a simple set of python web scraping functions that one can use to access stock data for Canadian and international stock markets using Google Finance.
I am a PhD student at the University of Guelph doing genomics research. In order to get the most out of my PhD I have put considerable time and effort into teaching myself to program and design software tools. This process began with me buying a textbook on Python to try to learn to automate some of the barbaric excel tasks I was doing and has snowballed into me learning several different programming languages and developing and interest in topics such as web scraping, machine learning, cloud computing and data munging/mining. In my spare time I also enjoy using Python to develop software for things such as analyzing stocks and developing web scrapers and crawlers.