News & Updates

The FINRA API team has been working diligently over the last several months to optimize the performance and reliability of the API platform. As part of this initiative the following capabilities have been added or modified:

1. Asynchronous API Requests: The API platform now supports both synchronous and asynchronous requests. Asynchronous requests are designed for accessing large amounts of data and allow for more records to be returned per API request.
2. Historical Datasets: Historical datasets have been introduced to segment prior year data from current year data where it makes sense. The first historical dataset is the weekly summary historical dataset (weeklySummaryHistoric). Beginning May 3, 2021 the weeklySummary production dataset will only contain data for the latest rolling 12 months. The weeklySummary historical dataset will contain a rolling 4 years of data and is designed for one-time downloads of historic data, while the production dataset is designed for ongoing updates to the weekly summary data. Note that it is strongly recommended to use the asynchronous API when accessing a historical dataset.
3. Dataset Sorting: Due to the performance implications of API users trying to sort large datasets (some of which contain tens of millions of records) utilizing the FINRA API platform, the sortFieilds parameter has been unsupported for some time. We are now supporting the sortFields parameter, but to further protect the integrity of the API platform, we have imposed additional restrictions on the use of sorting.
4. Platform Usage Restrictions: Please refamiliarize yourself with the API platform usage restrictions. Specifically we have added further restrictions around the use of the offset parameter when paging that may be a breaking change for some implementations. Additionally, we have identified appropriate use guidelines for using the API platform that are essential to the overall integrity of the API platform.

Beyond the performance improvement initative the API team has also continued to add new datasets and modify exsiting datasets on the platform.

Dataset Additions

1. Market Transparency: Daily short sale aggregated volume by security for all short sale trades executed and reported to a FINRA trade reporting facility.
2. Firm: 4530 customer complaint filings submitted by a firm.
3. Registration: A number of new inactive individual datasets have been added including branch office, employments registrations, registration status, and individual details.In addition, a FirmProfile dataset was added.

Dataset Modifications

The following datasets have had fields removed that are available via alternative datasets in order reduce size and improve performance.

1. RegisteredIndividualBranchOfficeLocations 
2. BranchOfficeDetails
3. RegisteredIndividualEmployments 
4. RegisteredIndividual 
5. BranchOffice 

Finally, the equityShortInterest datset is being deprecated (effective 4/30/2021) and will be replaced by the equityShortInterestStandardized dataset. Use the /metadata endpoint to discover the new/changed fields included in the standardized dataset. This change is being made to conform with industry-wide push to standardize short interest data.

As always, reach out to API support with any questions related to these changes.

Stay tuned for much more in 2021 including the release of our Premium APIs and our data collection APIs for the U4.