With a remarkable growth rate of 47% in 2013, the Nigerian Stock Exchange is definitely one of the fastest growing stock markets in the world. No doubt, the NSE holds an attraction for stakeholders, both from Nigeria and other countries.
This has created a demand for software tools which investors can use to analyse and process the stock exchange data. Without such tools, it will be difficult to make wise investment decisions.
However, there have practically been no mobile applications for the analysis and presentation of data about the Nigerian Stock Market.
In a bid to change this, Celestine Omin (@CyberOmin) has created NSE Finance, an API for the Nigerian Stock Exchange. In this short interview with Celestine, we attempt to get answers relating to the use, the work process and the development roadmap for the API.
What is the NSEFinance API?
This is an API for the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Currently this only tracks Symbols, open price, closing price, highest and lowest price for the day, units traded and its value. There is no official API from the NSE and this has been a big pain for developers of the years. From my understanding access to these data can only go to brokerage firms and also CSCS – Central Securities and Clearing services.
How does the API work?
The API allows developers to interact with the NSE data via a ‘RESTful’- Representational State Transfer. Developers can get access to yesterday’s stock information for Nigerian Breweries by querying the API or even for the last 5 days . This will return a JSON object – Javascript Object Notation.
Is there a link to your documentation of the process?
The full documentation of the API including the list of client libraries and code samples are available here; and there’s a Python library for easy understanding.
Why did you decide to create this API?
5 years ago, a small stock broking firm approached me to build a website that will list daily stock prices. As at then there wasn’t any programmable interface to get these data, and at the time, my engineering skills were very limited.. I lost the project. This led me to the problem faced by some developers daily. A search for Nigerian Stock Exchange API on Google yields almost no valuable result. A search for the same on Nairaland points you to so many requests.
What is the development roadmap for this project?
Currently, I plan to support this project to the best of my ability. Data gathering is on auto pilot. The biggest thing now will be how to keep the server up. I’ll support this too. We also welcome support from people who think this is a worthwhile development.
What uses do you expect that the API can/will be put to?
It is a Stock monitoring app; a simple mobile app that monitors the NSE. Another use case will be an app that can allow me enter my phone number followed by interested symbols and I’ll get daily summary as SMS. More like a notification app; same can be applied via email.
Since it is not the official API of the Stock exchange, how secure or accurate is the data aggregated on it?
Right now, This is still an experiment. And this is stated clearly on the site .By no means should any one rely on this for any real life application.
Celestine also created the NSE Ticker. The NSE Ticker is the Android application, and it’s APK, that fulfills the purpose of equipping both novice and professional investors with tools to:
- Analyse the Nigerian Stock Market.
- Easily seek out the best and worst performing companies from an ocean of stocks.
- Make informed investment decisions.
He intends to release a widget soon. He says we can expect something along the lines of ‘Twitter cards for Stock symbols’.
Photocredit: Hamburg Re
