Strange issue with obtaining stock quotes from yahoo finance
I've been using yahoo finance for obtaining stock quotes in a java program for about 6 months now and haven't had any issues until recently. I'm using the following url to retrieve the quote for the last trade of a stock:

[http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&s=MSFT][1]

What happens is about every 5th retrieval (it's not consistent), rather than returning the data for the most recent trade, it returns data from 3 days ago.

I only see this issue in my java program... when I issue the url from a browser it always seems to work fine. I would've suspected the problem to be in my code except for the following conditions:

 1. This was working fine for many months and I haven't touched the
    code dealing with retrieving the data. 
 2. It happens totally
    randomly. I cycle through the stocks in the S&P 500 and sometimes a
    particular ticker will work and sometimes it doesn't. There is no
    discernible pattern.
 3. These users also reported a problem with yahoo finance at around the same time (it's not the exact same
    symptom as what I'm seeing but it is suspicious):
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6778138/yahoofinance-csv-file-error-in-price-5-05544704e8-or-similar-numbers-and-date

  [1]: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&s=MSFT
Strange issue with obtaining stock quotes from yahoo finance
===

I've been using yahoo finance for obtaining stock quotes in a java program for about 6 months now and haven't had any issues until recently. I'm using the following url to retrieve the quote for the last trade of a stock:

[http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&s=MSFT][1]

What happens is about every 5th retrieval (it's not consistent), rather than returning the data for the most recent trade, it returns data from 3 days ago.

I only see this issue in my java program... when I issue the url from a browser it always seems to work fine. I would've suspected the problem to be in my code except for the following conditions:

 1. This was working fine for many months and I haven't touched the
    code dealing with retrieving the data. 
 2. It happens totally
    randomly. I cycle through the stocks in the S&P 500 and sometimes a
    particular ticker will work and sometimes it doesn't. There is no
    discernible pattern.
 3. These users also reported a problem with yahoo finance at around the same time (it's not the exact same
    symptom as what I'm seeing but it is suspicious):
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6778138/yahoofinance-csv-file-error-in-price-5-05544704e8-or-similar-numbers-and-date

  [1]: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv&s=MSFT