Options for Sourcing International Fundamental Stock Data

Summary

The document compares ways to obtain international company fundamentals for a stock screening database. The requested data includes financial statements and basic market quotes across multiple countries, with no need for real-time updates. It presents two broad approaches: purchase a ready-made dataset or assemble and maintain a database from a provider’s API.

The response names historical premium datasets offered through Quandl, along with country-specific collections, and describes an Interactive Brokers route using Reuters Worldwide Fundamentals. The latter is characterized as inexpensive for non-professionals and broad in coverage, but it requires more development work to retrieve, organize, and maintain the data. The exchange does not compare current prices, licensing terms, field coverage, update schedules, or data quality across providers. The provider names and product details reflect the source’s time and should be checked before making a procurement decision.

Key ideas

• A screening database needs fundamentals and basic quotes with coverage across the target countries.
• A ready-made dataset can reduce the work of building and maintaining a database.
• An API-based provider route may cost little but requires implementation effort.
• Provider coverage, cost, licensing, update frequency, and data quality need direct comparison before selection.

Tags

# Getting international fundamental stock market data


# Getting international fundamental stock market data












I am thinking of building some custom stock screening tool.

For this I need fundamental data (parts of balance sheet, earnings statements, cash flow statement if available, probably some minimal stock market quotes, ...) for lots of companies in several countries, not just the US. Real-time data is not needed, it can be significantly delayed if that makes it easier or cheaper.

What are my options for this? Where can I find this data? Would it be more efficient to collect this data from various websites and starting to build a database using someone from upwork, or to buy this data service somewhere at a reasonable price?

## Answer by Brian from QuantRocket (score 4, accepted)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/34996

Quandl has two premium fundamental datasets that may be of interest to you, Robur Global Select Stock Fundamentals and Mergent Global Fundamentals Data. Quandl also has fundamental datasets for specific countries including the US, China, and India.

If you have an Interactive Brokers account and can program against their API, you can sign up for Reuters Worldwide Fundamentals and build your own database. This dataset has good global coverage and is very cheap (only a few dollars per month for non-professionals), but it will be significantly more development work to build your own database using IB's API, as opposed to purchasing a ready-made database from Quandl.

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.