Note: On January 17, 2017 Yahoo changed their financial pages so most of the interesting information is hidden inside Javascript code. The remaining html content that can be scraped from Yahoo pages may be useful to "momentum traders" (like AverageDailyVolume10Day) but items that "value investors" need (like number of shares outstanding) are not available to an html content fetch.

The good news is that PhantomJS) is able to run the target website javascript and return the result as html content. The javascript content (what you'd see in a popular browser) is exactly what and investor wants to see. The not so good news is the fetch overhead is very high. A simple Java fetch takes 0.25 elapsed seconds and 0.002 compute seconds page (single 3Ghz core). A PhantomJS fetch takes 13 elapsed seconds (resourceTimeout=5 seconds) and 0.030 compute seconds per page...so 50 times longer with a 15 times bigger hit on the CPU.

With 6000 "interesting" stocks (AMEX+Nasdaq+NYSE) to download: PhantomJS needs is 22 hours to fetch and cache. The process is already segemented and only does 1/5 of the stocks per day (to keep from being banned by Yahoo). Even with this throttle it will take over 4 hours to refresh my local cache.

With the use of Javascript growing there is little choice. Sooty is now rewriting the parsers to use PhantomJS provided content (other tools may have a differnet layout). After that Sooty will pull apart the PhantomJS sources looking for a faster subset or try another approach.

If this is your first time here please read the explanation on why these stocks were selected. You should understand that Sooty is a "value investor" with a "buy and hold" strategy who is only interested in income generating stocks and bonds. If you are a day trader with technical strategy looking for momentum or short plays you will find Sooty's strategy boring. You may still be interested in the three spreadsheets on this page that include all stocks listed on the NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX exchanges including over 50 columns of stock performance and profile data.

The following is a list of candidates for your investigation. Once again Sooty is NOT recommending you buy these (nor does Sooty expect a cut if you make a lot of money on them). Foreign stocks represent less than 10% of the stocks on the American exchanges but if you are Canadian and interested in tax sheltered investments that will not suffer a $US currency risk these are about all you get.

There is a tax agreement between Canada and the USA so that American stocks held in Canadian pension instruments (RRSPs, RIFs and LIFs) are not taxed at the source nor are Canadian stocks held in 401Ks. Exchanges in other countries will require you pay a withholding tax and file a tax return to recover this tax. Non-pension investments by Canadians (like TFSAs) will suffer a withholding tax and you will have to file a US return to get (some) of your money back.

The stocks are listed are the top foreign stocks with the highest income/price ratio listed on each of the exchanges. The table is limited to the top 20 stocks and one should be skeptical of stocks with yields over 20% because there is either something wrong with the data or the company. If you go to the CSV you will see all the stocks.


Clicking the column header will sort by that column. A short comment about the column will appear if you move the mouse over a column header.

NASDAQ Stock Exchange