Markets & Capital · Markets · on the bench
Finance
Primary sources, named, and a working Form 4 decoder. No portfolios, and a yield curve without the two-year.
Scorecard · 12 of 20 checks met
How the checks workMissed S2: quotes are Yahoo's unofficial endpoints; the debt, rates and filings are primary.
All four: wires named, re-read times shown, the debt clock marked extrapolated.
Missed P3: no second feed was checked against the quotes.
None: a live desk fetches, and lookups pass through the labs relay.
Missed R3 (no portfolios, screeners or options) and R4 (nothing to keep).
01What it is
Finance is a live, keyless desk that names every wire it reads. A tape runs across indices, rates, commodities, currencies and crypto; a symbol lookup brings charts, news, SEC filings and decoded insider Form 4 trades; and the page adds a Treasury yield curve, the national debt from the Treasury's own daily figure, and the day's headlines.
It is for retail investors and curious readers who want market data and primary filings on one page, with the source of each figure named.
02How it works
The work is split between the browser and a relay on the same origin. Straight from the browser come Frankfurter (the ECB's reference rates), CoinGecko and Coinbase, the US Treasury's Fiscal Data API and alternative.me's crypto Fear & Greed index (finance.js:8-19, 548-587). Through finance/proxy.php, a fixed allow-list relay with a cache time per host, go Yahoo Finance's public endpoints, SEC EDGAR and Google News (proxy.php:1-35, 116-118).
The relay's insiders action fetches the latest Form 4 filings from EDGAR and parses each filing's XML into one row per transaction, sending the named User-Agent the SEC asks for (proxy.php:17-18, 124-160). The debt clock starts from the Treasury's latest debt-to-the-penny figure and labels its ticking extrapolated (finance.js:521-527). Hidden tabs do not fetch (finance.js:21-23). If the relay is missing, reads fall back to the public relay api.allorigins.win (finance.js:65-67).
03The test
On Sunday 27 September 2026 we read the yield curve and the insider feed through the relay on the local copy, tried to push a foreign address through it, and called two of the direct wires ourselves.
| UTC | What we did | What came back |
|---|---|---|
| 20:00:20Z | Page on the local copy | HTTP 200, 61,527 bytes; finance.js 43,517 bytes. |
| 20:01:40Z | Yield curve via the relay | HTTP 200 in 0.08 s: 3-month 4.07, 5-year 5.007, 10-year 5.184, 30-year 5.504; Friday's close, 25 Sep 18:59:55 UTC. |
| 20:01:43Z | The relay asked for example.com | HTTP 403: host not allowed. |
| 20:01:45Z | The Form 4 decoder | 40 filings decoded into 124 transaction rows, from the relay's cache built at 19:58:16Z. First row: a GigaCloud Technology director sold 4,497 shares on 24 Sep at $53.58 ($240,966), holding 20,950 after. |
| 20:02:37Z | Treasury and Frankfurter, direct | Treasury: 31 rows, latest 24 Sep, total public debt $40,068,807,991,924.84. Frankfurter: rates dated 25 Sep; EUR 0.87696, GBP 0.75458, JPY 157.59. |
04The comparison
Yahoo Finance
fetched 2026-09-27What it is
A full consumer finance portal: quotes, charts, news, portfolios, screeners and premium tiers.
What it does better
Far broader coverage (stocks, options, futures, ETFs, mutual funds) with portfolios, stock screeners and comparison, advanced charts and an earnings calendar.
Where Finance goes further
Finance names every source on the page and reads primary data directly (the Treasury's debt figure, the ECB's rates, SEC filings) alongside Yahoo's quotes (finance.js:1-19). It decodes Form 4 filings on the same desk, with no account, no premium tier and no ads on the desk.
Finviz, Insider Trading
fetched 2026-09-27What it is
A table of recent insider transactions from Form 4 filings, with buy and sale filters.
What it does better
Buy-only and sale-only views, a weekly top list, and a longer, filterable history.
Where Finance goes further
The same Form 4 fields (issuer, insider, relationship, date, code, shares, price, value, holdings after) decoded by the desk's own relay from each filing's XML, beside quotes, filings, rates and news (proxy.php:124-160).
SEC EDGAR full-text search
fetched 2026-09-27What it is
The SEC's own search across the full text of electronic filings since 2001.
What it does better
It is the primary source, searchable across every filing's text since 2001, with filters for filing type, date range and location.
Where Finance goes further
Finance puts a company's latest 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K and Form 4 links, with a one-click full-text search, next to its price chart and news (finance.js:419-437).
05Where it falls short
- The yield curve has four points (3-month, 5-year, 10-year and 30-year, from Yahoo's index symbols;
finance.js:528-530). There is no two-year point. - Quotes come from Yahoo Finance's unofficial public endpoints through a relay, not from a licensed feed; if the relay is absent, lookups go to a third-party public relay.
- No accounts, portfolios, watchlists, alerts, screeners or earnings calendar.
- The insider feed shows the latest filings market-wide or for one company, with no filter for buys only, size or clusters.
06The ruling
Finance goes to the trouble of reaching primary sources and naming them, rather than repackaging one feed. Its relay refused a foreign address with a 403 in our test, and its Form 4 decoder turned forty fresh filings into 124 readable rows. It scores zero on Footprint, and that is structural rather than careless: a live market desk has to fetch, and a relay does the heavy lifting.
It is not a portal: no portfolios, no screeners, a curve missing its two-year. Use it to see where a number came from; keep Yahoo for tracking what you own.
On the docket: 12 of 20 checks met. Primary sources, named, and a working Form 4 decoder; no portfolios, and a yield curve without the two-year.