MarketParquet vs Yahoo Finance
> free unofficial scraper of Yahoo's web endpoints
yfinance is a Python wrapper around Yahoo Finance's web endpoints. It's free, ubiquitous, and the right choice for casual exploration. It's also unofficial, undocumented, rate-limited unpredictably, and not a stable foundation for anything you intend to run reliably. MarketParquet exists for the moment your yfinance script breaks in production.
[ Side-by-side ]
| Yahoo Finance (yfinance) | MarketParquet | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | free | free for daily; $36/mo (annual) Pro for intraday history |
| Stability / SLA | none -- Yahoo can change or rate-limit at any time | documented API with rate limits and retries |
| History depth | varies by ticker; gaps and inconsistencies common | stocks/ETFs from 2000, futures from Dec 2007 |
| Survivorship bias | delisted tickers often missing or incomplete | delisted tickers included |
| Splits / dividends | ad-hoc, sometimes wrong | split-adjusted by source |
| Format | in-memory pandas DataFrame after parsing JSON/HTML | Parquet files you cache locally |
| Bulk downloads | rate-limited, ticker-by-ticker | one Parquet per trading day, all tickers |
[ Where Yahoo Finance (yfinance) wins ]
- Genuinely free, no signup.
- Convenient for exploring single tickers interactively.
- Includes some fundamentals via yfinance helpers.
[ Where MarketParquet wins ]
- Reproducible: a cached Parquet file produces the same backtest forever.
- Bulk-load 25 years of history without rate limits.
- Documented schema and adjustment policy.
- No 'why is this ticker suddenly missing today' debugging.
[ Which to pick ]
Pick Yahoo Finance (yfinance) if you're prototyping, learning, or doing one-off analysis on a handful of tickers and reliability isn't critical.
Pick MarketParquet if you're running scheduled backtests, your research will be cited or shared, or you've already lost a weekend to yfinance returning different numbers than last week.
> Pricing and feature snapshots reflect public information at time of writing and may shift. Always confirm against Yahoo Finance (yfinance)'s own pricing page before committing.