How to Use Residential IPs for Financial Data

Financial data websites and apps, including those that offer stock investment tips and track market trends accurately, can reap big money for their owners and developers. However, bad advice can cost your company. It can erode your website visitors’ trust and, ultimately, hurt your profitability. In the world of investments, slight inaccuracies can yield poor results for your clients.

To provide the best suggestions, you need the ability to cull reliable financial data from a variety of sources and then process and analyze it accurately. Data processing is not as difficult with today’s sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. Where most investment sites get hung up, instead, is on data collection. The risk of getting caught and having your IP blocked from sites increases when you are trying to scrape financial websites for data. Many of these sites block data center IPs without even giving them a chance to crawl the site. Others look for behaviors that mimic bots and then block those IPs to prevent the risk of cybercrimes.

It’s not surprising that financial websites try to keep data out of the hands of competitors, protect their own customers’ financial data, and keep their site up and running with state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures. It just makes it harder for anyone trying to crawl financial data.

Why Websites Block Web Scrapers and Data Center IPs

Finding reliable financial data that is accurate up to the second continues to be a challenge. You can still use bots to crawl websites and scrape financial data at lightning speeds. They can even make multiple requests at the same time for faster data collection, but it gets harder by the day to use bots effectively.

Financial sites, especially, protect their data with state-of-the-art anti-virus and malware apps that detect suspicious or automated activity and shut it down swiftly. They have a lot at stake, as they must protect their users’ financial data from cybercriminals and also continue to keep their website up and running. Downtime can equal lost revenue. Because bots move so quickly, their behavior mimics hackers initiating a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Additionally, many financial data sites simply block commercial IP addresses from accessing their data as part of their normal cybersecurity measures. These companies get more creative every day to stay ahead of the curve and prevent intruders, scrapers, and cybercriminals from accessing their site’s data. Sites may also detect a data center IP address and, instead of blocking the IP entirely, simply cloak valuable information.

Ways to Avoid Getting Blocked

There are several tactics to avoid getting your IP address and bots blocked.

You can leave time in between requests, to make it look more like a human being – not a bot – is visiting the site. But this can vastly slow down your data collection efforts and make it hard to spot patterns and achieve accurate data analysis.

You may be able to use a scraper that varies search patterns so it doesn’t look like a bot. You can also cache pages after they are scaped. That way, your software can go back and view the data for analysis without multiple visits to the site. However, this could lead to collecting outdated data if you don’t capture the information before it changes.

How Proxies Help

You can also use a proxy – that is, an IP address different from your own – to scrape data. The best proxies should offer rotating IPs to further confuse cybersecurity software and prevent your bots from getting blocked.

If you’re dealing in specific states, regions, or countries, you’ll want a collection of IP addresses from that area to more effectively scrape geographically specific data.

Make sure to choose a proxy that provides 24/7 customer service. On the off chance you encounter a problem, you don’t want it to shut your business down or delay your data collection efforts.

Employ a Residential IP to Scrape Financial Data

Proxies can effectively scrape data, but financial websites often detect when IPs come from a commercial data center and block the IP. However, residential proxies don’t run into these same pitfalls.

Many financial services companies and stock picking apps have discovered that residential IPs effectively scrape financial data with less risk of being blocked or shut down. Using a residential IP to scrape financial data can give you access to information from reputable stock sites, including, but not limited to, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NYSE locations in major cities, the Nasdaq exchange, the Investors Exchange LLC, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

To get the most accurate financial data to plug into your sophisticated algorithms and yield stock predictions, you’ll want more than just real-time pricing information. Gain access to changes in employee headcount, sales, and revenue. Analyze the data in real-time and provide your website visitors or app users with the information they need to make smarter investment decisions.

But how do you get started and what should you look for in a residential IP?

Benefits of Residential IPs

In addition to being able to crawl sites faster, and even simultaneously, for real-time financial data collection, a residential proxy IP eliminates captchas that can hold up your data collection efforts. By using Spider’s IPs, your IPs won’t be blocked because Spider’s residential IPs draw from more than 70 million ethically sourced residential IPs on a private network.

All requests are routed through real users, not data centers, virtually eliminating the possibility of having your IP blocked by reputable financial data sites. Spider partners with app developers and offers monetization opportunities when the developers use Spider’s GDPR-compliant SDK.

What To Look for in a Residential IP

Residential Proxy IP providers vary in their costs, reliability, and the number of IPs they can offer to customers. To keep your financial website or app running smoothly and to provide your users with the most accurate, up-to-date data, you want to make sure to choose a residential proxy IP provider that relies on the latest Network Address Translation (NAT) technology.

If you’re attempting to access geo-restricted data, such as scraping financial data about international companies that might block U.S. IP addresses, you want to choose a company that offers residential IP addresses originating from anywhere in the world.

When you’re choosing a residential IP provider, ask about:

• Connectivity rates
• The availability of international IPs
• City-level targeting
• The number of residential IPs available
• Concurrent requests
• A free trial
• 24/7 service
• Ability to re-route proxies on demand
• Query success rates

Residential IP proxies should offer a zero block rate because uptime is critical to a successful financial data business.

How to Implement a Residential IP for Financial Data Crawling

Once you’ve determined that a residential IP proxy is the best way to collect data for your financial website, it’s easy to get started.

Your needs in terms of monthly gigabytes of data used will determine the price of the plan. The higher your GB requirements, the lower the price per GB, but the higher your monthly fee. You are getting more for your money with an Enterprise plan, for instance, that offers up to 10,000GB of data.

All Spider plans offer unlimited IPs and unlimited sub-users, as well as city-level targeting to crawl local and regional sites for more accurate and relevant data. The difference in plans relates to the amount of data you need to collect, with plans available from 5GB to 10,000GB monthly.

If you’ve been trying other methods to extract time-sensitive, to-the-second financial data from reputable investment and financial services sites, you will be surprised how a residential IP proxy can improve your productivity and web crawling speed. The data you collect will deliver more accurate, real-time results.

How successful have your web crawling measures been in the past? Have you considered using a residential proxy IP to improve your results?

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