Quite some time ago now, Stock Menulet stopped showing a price for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, probably the most widely followed stock symbol in the world. I’m writing to issue a big fat mea culpa for having taken so long to fix this bug.
I apologize. The origin of the bug was simple: Yahoo’s Finance API simply stopped giving prices for this symbol. This change was a major surprise to me. Until now, I’ve been impressed with the absolute stability of the (largely undocumented) Yahoo Finance API over many years. Their decision to simply stop publishing prices for the Dow Jones Industrial Average came as a shock. Apparently, the change was caused by a change in the licensing terms given to Yahoo by Dow Jones.
The fix was a doozy. Fixing the problem required exploring another largely undocumented API, the Google Stock Price API, and then implementing support for that API as a backup to the Yahoo API. It wasn’t a fun task, and it happened to come in the middle of a large number of other projects.
So, to those of you who have been longing to see the Dow Jones average again: I’m sorry. But it’s fixed now. And it should stay that way!
Sincerely,
Phil