Free, accurate foreign exchange data feed for GBP?

December 10, 2006 1:04 PM

I'm trying to avoid shelling out an annual fee to XE for UK foreign exchange data. The European Central Bank provides a feed with Euro as base currency and the Bank of NZ has one for NZD. Surely there's a GBP equivalent?
posted by Foaf to computers & internet (10 comments total)

If you can stand the terrible web design try this.
posted by public at 1:28 PM on December 10, 2006

(That data is all supplied by GTIS)
posted by public at 1:30 PM on December 10, 2006

Similarly, I was looking for an RSS feed for forex (although in Euro). The closest I could find was XE's Email service (which works of GBP, free for personal non-commercial use), and I send it to Bloglines as an email subscription.

I looked at the ECB page you link to, but I don't see an RSS feed there for currency data, just press releases and so forth. Could you post the RSS feed address here? Thanks....
posted by Boobus Tuber at 2:11 PM on December 10, 2006

Would this be useful? It's not very well laid out, every currency is a separate post, but it does have the information.

Currency Exchange Rates via RSS
posted by Boobus Tuber at 2:19 PM on December 10, 2006

Also this one seems better, you can customize the info that you want:

Currency exchange rates
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/rippy/exchange/
posted by Boobus Tuber at 2:29 PM on December 10, 2006

You can also get dynamic exchange information from Google. Just type "49 euros in british pounds" to get, um, the answer. Depending on your intended use, that may be all you need.
posted by jamescridland at 2:47 PM on December 10, 2006

When you say "accurate", what do you mean by that?

Do you need daily data, or high frequency data?
posted by b1tr0t at 3:09 PM on December 10, 2006

b1tr0t: I'd prefer a feed that updated more than once a day, but it's not super important.

Boobus Tuber: It's not RSS, but the ECB provides an xml formatted feed here . The Canadian site you pointed to is using pretty much the same algorithm as I am already and it's mostly accurate.

Since I first asked I've found this site which provides a 30-day trial. It's still for pay, but is a bit less expensive than XE.

Thanks for all the answers.
posted by Foaf at 4:24 PM on December 10, 2006

If you can code in perl, the Finance::Quote modules can do FX quotes.

ino.com is fairly easy to scrape, but I think scraping is against their TOS (or was a few years ago).

OandA has "real time" quotes on their front page, though I suspect they are actually delayed. It wouldn't be hard to scrape from their popup window, assuming it isn't agains their TOS. OandA is a very well regarded broker in the retail FX world.

If you needed truly real-time and high-frequency quotes, you would want to take a look at interactive brokers. They offer a free API, but you need to fund your account with $10k or so in order to open it.

IB does have a free delyed "demo" feed. You can connect with the API for $0, as you don't even need an account. On a high-frequency (under a minute) basis, the data is very inacurate. On a daily basis, it is proably fine.

I have an account with IB, and use both their retail quote feed and the "paptertrading" quote feed for developing trading systems. I havn't touched the demo feed in nearly a year.

If you only need daily data, don't spend any money. There are too many free sources out there. I pay $10 / month to kep my IB account open when I'm not trading, and pull down quotes every second, or whenever IB pushes them down to me (often 100ms or less between quotes).
posted by b1tr0t at 5:35 PM on December 10, 2006

Also, keep in mind that FX isn't traded on an exchange, it is an OTC market between banks. Depending on your application, you may want to source quotes from multiple brokers. On a daily basis, this may not be an issue. If your computations are down to the pip, then you will need to spend some effort locating good quotes.
posted by b1tr0t at 5:37 PM on December 10, 2006