[0.2.59] How to fetch all holdings of an index fund

[lucy2329]

Hi there, I want to fetch all holdings of the SPY and am unable to find anything in the documentation regarding holdings of a particular index fund. Does any one know how I can reliably achieve this?

[jcmiii]

I believe you would need to assemble the constituents of SPY outside of yfinance. Once you did that, you could use yfinance to download price data for each. Maybe build a web scraper for a website like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies ?

[lucy2329]

Do you know if one exists? if not, I can probably create a PR to expose it as part of yfinance itself

[jcmiii]

One issue is that the constituents of the S&P 500 change frequently, and not on a schedule. It would require monitoring to keep the list up to date. Doesn't seem like it's within the scope of what yfinance is trying to accomplish.

[ValueRaider]

yfinance job is simply send requests to Yahoo and tidy data it returns. Show us where Yahoo lists index fund holdings and someone can add a fetch.

[lucy2329]

One issue is that the constituents of the S&P 500 change frequently, and not on a schedule. It would require monitoring to keep the list up to date. Doesn't seem like it's within the scope of what yfinance is trying to accomplish.

Wouldn't scraping it from wikipedia fix that though? I presume wikipedia will update it promptly whenever the holdings in SPY change, right?

[jcmiii]

It's possible, but I wouldn't assume it will always be updated promptly. Depends on who's updating Wikipedia - it's managed by volunteers. If accuracy were important I'd probably try to find a professionally maintained source. Maybe there's something on the S&P website, since they maintain the index.