Top Movers, Losers, and Gainers as displayed in SeekingAlpha home page.

Displaying the most active securities (top gainers, top losers, top movers) in a market has become a pillar of most financial websites. The best financial websites such as Yahoo! Finance, SeekingAlpha (an Xignite client), and StockTwits (another Xignite client) all display top mover activity on their homepage. This is a popular feature because it provides investors with a quick insight into what is going on in the market.

Xignite APIs have supported this feature since their inception. It is a critical capability of any market data API because the “pull” nature of REST does not give clients visibility on the activity of every security–unless they pull them all. Doing so would be overly complex and burdensome. The solution is a scalable top movers API like the one found here.

But what if you are a robo-advisor and you are not intended to offer stock trading to your users, but instead only offer ETFs? What if you are trying to populate a website page focused on ETFs instead of stocks? In that context, such an API is not useful as it will typically only list faster moving stocks (often focused around penny-stocks).

Introducing the new Universe parameter of the GetTopMarketMovers API. With this new parameter, you can specify that you are only interested in seeing ETFs listed. Just add Universe=ExchangeTradedFunds to your REST call URL and our API will automatically filter the resultset of your call. Note that this feature is only available when using REST. This parameter is not available in a SOAP call.

For example, this request, will return the following:

This feature is available today and for all clients. You can use it in our XigniteGlobalQuotes, and XigniteGlobalRealTime APIs. Please contact us for a free trial.