Stooq

What it is

Stooq is a Polish financial portal, in Polish and English, best known outside Poland for one page: a free historical database of daily, hourly and 5-minute bars, published as ASCII text or MetaStock files and refreshed overnight. Each instrument's page also has a CSV download link for its own daily history, and the site carries the charts and quote tables of an ordinary portal.

For years it was the standard fallback when Yahoo Finance broke, because it asked for no key and had a reader in pandas-datareader. Both of those have changed in 2026, and that is most of what this card is for.

Pricing

Free, with nothing to upgrade to: no subscription, no key, no request quota published anywhere. The cost is the licence. The download page says the data is "intended solely for personal use. Any commercial use is prohibited", and section 5.3 of the terms of service bars redistributing any of it without Stooq's consent. S&P Dow Jones index data on the site carries its own personal, non-commercial clause and a ban on using it to build or track any investment product.

Data & coverage

The bulk database is split by market and interval. The daily US folder holds files for 4,660 Nasdaq stocks, 4,532 NYSE stocks, 327 NYSE American stocks and 3,812 ETFs, and runs to 515 MB as ASCII. Beside it are the London Stock Exchange (1,821 stocks, 4,742 ETFs), the Tokyo exchange, Hong Kong, the Warsaw exchange down to bonds, futures, options and structured products, Budapest, Polish mutual funds, and a world folder of currencies, cryptocurrencies, bonds and indices. A macro folder carries economic series for 37 countries and the euro area.

Depth is per listing — Apple's daily series starts in September 1984. Intraday files exist only for the US, UK, Hong Kong, Poland, Hungary and the world folder; Japan and macro are daily only. There is no fundamentals data and no corporate-actions file, and the database page does not say how prices are adjusted for splits and dividends — check a known split before trusting a series.

Integrations

None, officially. Stooq publishes no API and no documentation for one. What people scripted against were the plain per-symbol CSV URLs, and pandas-datareader 0.11.0 (23 June 2026) removed its Stooq reader, together with Yahoo, Tiingo, Quandl and IEX, as dependent on defunct or broken upstream APIs.

The URLs themselves are now guarded. Between 20 May and 8 June 2026, by Internet Archive captures, every page gained a JavaScript proof-of-work check, and on 4 October 2026 a scripted request that solved it — session cookie and referrer in place — still got Access denied from a single-symbol CSV link and Unauthorized from a bulk archive. In a browser the bulk files ask for a four-character image captcha first; they were already captcha-gated in March 2026.

Limitations

• Not for anything commercial. Personal use only, and no redistribution without consent. A product, a client report or a public dataset built from it is outside the terms.
• Scripted access was refused when we tried. On 4 October 2026 a scripted request got Access denied and Unauthorized where a browser got the files; plan on downloading by hand, and expect a nightly job written before June 2026 to need checking.
• No adjustment documentation and no fundamentals. Prices only, with no published adjustment method.
• No support relationship. The terms say continuous access cannot be guaranteed, and there is no paid tier to buy a guarantee with.

Alternatives

yfinance is the other free, keyless route, with its own breakage history and Yahoo's terms. Tiingo and EODHD sell documented end-of-day APIs for small monthly fees, with keys and published limits. For survivorship-free US history with delisted names, Norgate Data and CSI Data are the paid standard.