When most people think about the stock market, they imagine Wall Street traders in suits shouting into their cell phones. However, the stock market is more than just a place for high-powered professionals to make money.
It is a tool that can be used to study historical trends and predict future outcomes. This is exactly what one college student set out to do when he used the Polygon API to study historical stock market data.
My Experience with Polygon.io
I’m an EECS major, and was originally interested in using PolygonIO’s service because of their easy to use RESTful APIs, and their real-time financial data, available for building web applications.
The documentation provided by PolygonIO makes it easy for anyone to get started with limited pre-existing knowledge. Their python RESTful API library allowed me to get straight into creating programs without making my own API handler. The quality and quantity of the PolygonIO data allows me to create stock tracking and trading programs which are reliable and successful.
After trying to use several free API’s available, Polygon stood out due to its:
- Ease of use
- Cleanliness of data
- Breadth of data available
- Ability to get real-time data
- Affordability
- Clear, concise documentation (with great support, which is useful as a student!)
I decided to use PolygonIO’s services in order to study past stock market trends and attempt to predict future outcomes, which was inspired by Robinson’s UGBA 101 class.
For any prospective engineering students, I would recommend starting with Denero’s CS61A class, which would provide a good fundamental base, to learning the necessary skills to interact with the Polygon API.
What’s Next?
While I’ll be continuing to explore historical trends in the stock market (spanning back till before the Great Financial Crisis), I plan to also implement my findings and turn them into a viable investing strategy.
With the real-time data available with Polygon as well, I’m confident that I can gather the necessary skills through 61C and a few other CS classes, to then build my first “trading bot,” that allows me to earn part time income as a college student.
I encourage anyone who is interested in the stock market or data science to give PolygonIO a try – it’s been a great experience for me so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with their API!
About Polygon.io
Polygon.io stocks API enables instant access to financial data with a developer centric, API first approach. Polygon.io provides the most accurate real-time and historical data available. Polygon.io provides institutional level market data access to individual developers through their robust RESTful and Websocket APIs.