All, I'm embarking on a rather large and ambitious project and I'm thinking the QP2 database could be the best (and most convenient) data source for this project. Of course I want the usual OHLCV data for equities but I'm also interested in index, industry group and general market data like "number of advances", "number of declines", "volatility" and so forth. And fundemental data! QP2 provides all of this.
What QP2 doesn't seem to provide are measures like option chains, Put/Call Ratio and Open Interest. Guess you can't have everything. Before I commit to QP2, though, I'm wondering if there are free alternatives such as Yahoo or Google quotes and if it's possible to extract these quotes in either a tabular or XML format. Grabbing the content of a web page programmatically is a no-brainer, but I don't want to parse all of the HTML cruft that comes with it. And I don't want to manually read and download CSV files. In the world of Web 2.0 everything should work seemlessly as a web service. If I do go with QP2, the next problem I have is how to get this data out of the QP2 database. It appears I would have to write my code (currently Java for portability) on the same Windows platform as where the QP2 database resides. I would prefer to develop under Unix or Mac OS X, but unless there's a way to remotely access that data, I think I'm stuck with Windows. So... any opinions? Are there any free options I've overlooked that I could access remotely and that provide as convenitent and comprehensive a data set as QP2? -- John
