US financial data websites are not one kind of source. Some are the record itself: a filing at the SEC, a bond trade reported to FINRA. Others republish those records or add a layer of their own - a consensus rating, an estimate, a headline. Mix them without saying which is which, and one insider sale is counted three times.
Below: seven US financial data websites we scrape, what each shows, what it adds and what it is best for; then the keys and dates that join them, and lessons from two alternative data projects. The wider service is on our financial data scraping services page.
It is for teams that buy financial data instead of building crawlers: hedge funds and quant teams after alternative data, fintech products, equity research and investor relations teams, and compliance teams doing due diligence. The list runs from primary sources to aggregators to editorial layers, since the closer a site is to the original record, the more rows elsewhere it confirms; it is not a ranking of quality. For finance use cases in general, see how web scraping helps the finance industry.
All seven publish in English, mostly in US dollars. Five fields need a rule first:
EDGAR is the filing system of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: listed companies file annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on 10-Q and IPO registrations on S-1, and their insiders report trades on Form 4. Every filer carries a CIK, its Central Index Key, and every filing an accession number, a filing date and the period it covers; an amendment arrives as a new filing marked /A. A renamed company keeps its CIK, and CIKs are never reused. From a filing we extract company name and symbol, line items such as revenue, profit, assets and debt, and narrative such as risk disclosures and auditor comments. EDGAR is the original: the insider and holdings tables elsewhere on this list are rebuilt from its forms. Best for point-in-time fundamentals, event studies and due diligence. See our SEC EDGAR scraper page.
FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, is the self-regulatory organization for US broker-dealers. On finra.org, TRACE bond pages key on the nine-character CUSIP, whose first six characters name the issuer: coupon, maturity, TRACE Grade (Investment Grade or High-Yield), latest sale price and yield to worst, and per trade execution time, price, yield, quantity, side and contra party type, with cancels, corrections and late as-of reports marked. TRACE shows executed trades only, never quotes. Short interest comes twice a month, published days after its settlement date. BrokerCheck describes each registered firm under its CRD number, with state registrations, types of business and disclosure events; individual brokers' names stay out by default. Best for bond price histories and firm checks; for the compliance side, see our post on big data in AML and KYC. See our FINRA scraper page.
FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, is the time series database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It produces few numbers itself, republishing series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board and many other sources, one page per series. The series ID is the key - UNRATE for the unemployment rate, DGS10 for the 10-year Treasury yield - and each page prints Units, Frequency, seasonal adjustment, the Updated stamp, the Next Release Date, and Source and Release as separate fields. So FRED aggregates but names the original publisher of every series. ALFRED, its archive of vintages, shows a series as it stood on each release date, so a revised GDP figure can be set against its first print. Best for macro context joined on date, and models that must not see a revision early. See our FRED scraper page.
MarketBeat, from MarketBeat Media in South Dakota, gives each listed company a page at /stocks/ plus an exchange code and the ticker, with tabs for forecast, earnings, dividend, insider trades, institutional ownership and short interest. The exchange code is part of the identifier, so a symbol listed in two places stays two rows. The ratings page at /ratings/ has one row per broker action: company, an action such as Upgrades or Lowers Target, brokerage, old and new price target, rating, and a Details link whose numeric record id is the closest thing to a stable key. What MarketBeat adds is normalization: each firm's wording becomes a score from sell to strong buy, which sets a consensus rating shown with the consensus price target and how both stood a month, three months and a year earlier. Best for consensus tracking and a per-ticker roll-up of insider trades, institutional holdings and short interest. See our MarketBeat scraper page.
Finviz is a US market research site built around a stock screener. A quote page is addressed by its ticker, and its snapshot table holds one label per cell: valuation (Market Cap, P/E, PEG, EV/EBITDA), growth and ratios (EPS Q/Q, Debt/Eq, ROE, ROIC), ownership (Insider Own, Inst Own, Shs Float), Short Float and technicals (SMA50, RSI (14), Beta, Rel Volume), beside analyst ratings, headlines and insider rows linked to the SEC Form 4. The screener shows the same measures as columns across US-listed stocks. What sets Finviz apart is breadth in one schema: a full-market table and a quote page join on the ticker, so a daily pass records which stocks entered or left a screen. Best for cross-sectional snapshots. See our Finviz scraper page.
Benzinga is a financial news and market data publisher filing short, ticker-tagged stories through the trading day. Its data sits in sortable tables under /calendars/: analyst ratings, earnings, dividends, IPOs, economic releases and unusual options activity. A rating row holds date, ticker, research firm, action, prior and current rating, old and new price target and Upside/Downside, with rating words kept as each firm wrote them. The earnings calendar first shows the EPS estimate and the revenue estimate, then fills Actual EPS, Actual Rev and both surprise columns after the report, so only repeated runs keep the pre-report state. IPO rows give the expected pricing date, price range, shares offered and lead underwriter. Article addresses carry a numeric article id, and a corrected story says CORRECTED in its headline. Best for event calendars and estimate-versus-actual series. See our Benzinga scraper page.
Seeking Alpha is a platform where independent investors and analysts publish research on US-traded stocks and ETFs, reviewed by its editors. Everything hangs on the symbol page at /symbol/ plus the ticker; cross-listed lines keep a suffix such as AAPL:CA. The public layer gives the quote, a key data strip (EPS, PE, Yield, Short Interest, Market Cap), the next earnings date with its pre-market or post-market slot, estimates with the count of revisions up and down, headlines with publish time and comment count, the list of earnings call transcripts by quarter, and the number of readers following the symbol. Follower and comment counts are the site's own signal: read on a schedule, they show which names draw attention and when. Premium ratings and grades are not in the dataset, and author names are left out by default. Best for attention and estimate-revision series. See our Seeking Alpha scraper page.
Spot current trends, identify risks, stay up to date with rates, stocks, news and make a profit.
One insider sale can sit in your data three times: a Form 4 on EDGAR, a Finviz row linking to it and a line in MarketBeat's insider tab. Three rules prevent that:
Neither project ran on a site of this list; both served buyers of alternative data.
An investment firm watched Hemnet, the Swedish property portal, as a business: each listing goes out with a paid package, Bas, Plus or Premium, and the share on the dearer packages is a read on what the portal earns. For about eleven months it received every new for-sale listing with municipality, package, asking price and publication date as XLSX on FTP, monthly at first, then twice a month; the first file, for one full month, held 9,509 new listings. The publication date decided the period, and repeats were removed: coverage counts on Seeking Alpha need both rules. Case: Hemnet listing package mix for an investment firm.
A US buyer of alternative real-estate data wanted all of Zillow, sale and rental homes nationwide. After a complete first set it asked for only what changed since the previous delivery, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, as CSV in its own Amazon S3 bucket; around 3 million listings are in scope, and the project has run for more than two years. A fund keeping its own copy of ratings or short interest needs the same dated record of what appeared, changed and went. Case: Zillow data across the US, three times a week.
ScrapeIt is a managed service: we build, run and repair the crawlers, and anti-bot handling - pacing, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA handling and rendering - is part of it. You send tickers, CUSIPs, series IDs or firms; a free project assessment comes first, and a sample can be ordered. Field documentation comes with the dataset, and runs are one-off or on your schedule.
Formats: CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSON, JSONLines, XML. Channels: our API (an endpoint we host), a JSON feed, FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, e-mail or a load into your database; an MCP server on request. Plans start from EUR 169 a month, or EUR 199 for a one-time extract. More sources: our list of financial data sources we scrape, among them the Yahoo Finance scraper, and all US sites we scrape.
It depends on the question: filings from SEC EDGAR, bonds and firm records from FINRA, macro series from FRED. Ratings and consensus come from MarketBeat and Benzinga, a full-market screen from Finviz, coverage per ticker from Seeking Alpha.
We collect only publicly available data - everything a visitor can see on the site - and we collect it legally. Names of individual brokers, insiders, analysts and authors are personal data: we handle personal data under GDPR and leave such fields out by default.
Through the CIK. EDGAR files each company under its Central Index Key, and a dated map from ticker to CIK keeps a renamed company in one history. Bonds join on the CUSIP, firms on the CRD number.
As often as the source changes: ratings, calendars and bond trades every trading day, short interest twice a month, 13F holdings once a quarter. FRED series are best read right after each release.
Yes, through ours. An endpoint we host returns the rows as JSON, keyed on ticker, CIK, CUSIP or series ID and refreshed on the schedule you set.
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