Yahoo Finance Forex Bars and Quote Sources
Summary
The document addresses where Yahoo Finance obtains foreign exchange data and why its daily bars may differ from charts or other providers. The accepted answer identifies ICE Data Services as Yahoo’s source and explains that OTC currency quotes are aggregated from market makers such as brokers and banks. A separate reply gives an example provider’s server-time trading schedule, illustrating that daily open and close values depend on the clock and data source used.
A commenter reports weak correlations between Yahoo quotes and another hourly dataset after shifting timestamps, then questions whether Yahoo values correspond to a specific market price. That comparison is anecdotal and the commenter acknowledges possible mistakes in the analysis. The discussion does not establish Yahoo’s exact daily bar cutoff or validate the suggested comparison. It highlights that forex has no centralized exchange session, so a daily bar must be interpreted in light of its provider, timezone, and definition of the trading day.
Key ideas
- Yahoo Finance identifies ICE Data Services as its foreign exchange data provider.
- OTC FX quotes can be sourced from market makers such as banks and brokers.
- Daily open and close values depend on the provider’s timezone and session boundaries.
- A user’s low correlation comparison is anecdotal and was not independently validated.
- Researchers should define the intended daily bar before comparing FX datasets.
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Full text
# Yahoo finance forex prices # Yahoo finance forex prices Good morning, I apologize for my poor english, I'm not an expert and I need your help... do you know how daily prices are calculated on Yahoo Finance Historical data? Let me give you an example, if you visit the EURUSD https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EURUSD%3DX/history?p=EURUSD%3DX Nov 24, 2020 open 1.1842 close 1.1843 where do they get the open price and the close price? what are the daily market open/close hours? I've also checked the chart but the daily prices are different Thanks in advance for your help Luigi ## Answer by AKdemy (score 4) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/71636 You can directly look up the data providers on the yahoo website: the source for fx rates is ICE Data Services. With regards to ICE, you can look these details up on their website. IC Markets’ server time and charts are GMT + 2 or GMT + 3 (when daylight savings is in effect). The trading hours for all currency pairs is 00:01 server time to 23:59 server time daily (23:57 on Friday). With regards to where ICE gets quotes from, they in turn do what everyone else does with OTC traded assets - get the quotes from a list of marker makers (brokers, banks etc). Depending on your needs, you may find this question and its answers interesting as well. ## Answer by Stranger (score 1) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/71632 I tried to compare yahoo finance forex quotes against hourly quotes I acquired from some other data source. I shifted data hour by hour and measured correlations between them. Surprisingly, the results was something like this: ``` 1 0.17399579680260843 2 0.17174534599697275 3 0.1724193820726977 4 0.173302277889905 5 0.1697194571445255 6 0.1710380711284467 7 0.17187410234699604 8 0.17376885695820282 9 0.17406428850983652 10 0.17523373864433653 11 0.1767224252391929 12 0.17432116338486367 13 0.1733483024200405 14 0.1737490827039034 15 0.17601770673011952 16 0.17591043025073533 17 0.17483328529712452 18 0.17663713501578154 19 0.17806894073024032 20 0.1782321236667205 21 0.17640520058823586 22 0.17552573539690403 23 0.1742427964578035 ``` Umm...maybe I made some mistake. I don't know. hehe. I stopped investigation here so I really don't know what's going on. (or maybe I made some mistake while I was tweaking data). So...as far as I know, yahoo quote didn't match any price on the reference data. Usually when I compare two different financial quotes under these circumstance I can get 0.9 something correlation coefficients. So I believe yahoo forex quote is the price from "nowhere". I suspect it is average price or something (Because there is no explicit "Open" or "Close" in forex market. Have you checked the price in "Open" and "Close" columns? it's almost the same or pretty close for most of the part in the dataframe...as you see, it's impossible). I think yahoo finance is one of the best (free or cheap) source of daily financial data for stocks, ETFs, futures but when it comes to forex quote, I recommend you to look for some other places (Plus, one question...Assume that you want "daily bar" data for some currency pair, what kind of "daily bar" you want? I mean, which timezone? On Monday, which hour it should "opens" and which hour it should "close" on Friday? It should be 24 hours for each bars? or adjusted somehow??).
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