Main source of the shares/stocks data on the web
The main source is a direct feed from the stock market itself. The faster the feed, the more expensive. 15-minute delay is essentially free... and for those of us who do long-term investment is more than adequate.  If you want data sooner, sign up with a brokerage that provides that service as part of what you're paying them for... and remember that every bit you spend on services is that much more profit you have to make just to break even, so there's a real tradeoff. "To expand on keshlam's answer: A direct feed does not involve a website of any kind.  Each exchange publishes its order/trade feed(s) onto a packet network where subscribers have machines listening and reacting. Let's call the moment when a trade occurs inside an exchange's matching engine ""T0"".  An exchange then publishes the specifics of that trade as above, and the moment when that information is first available to subscribers is T1.  In some cases, T1 - T0 is a few microseconds; in other (notorious) cases, it can be as much as 100 milliseconds (100,000x longer). Because it's expensive for a subscriber to run a machine on each exchange's network -- and also because it requires a team of engineers devoted to understanding each exchange's individual publication protocols -- it seems unlikely that Google pays for direct access.  Instead Google most likely pays another company who is a subscriber on each exchange around the world (let's say Reuters) to forward their incoming information to Google.  Reuters then charges Google and other customers according to how fast the customer wants the forwarded information.  Reuters has to parse the info it gets at T1, check it for errors, and translate it into a format that Google (and other customers) can understand.  Let's say they finish all that work and put their new packets on the internet at time T2. Then the slow crawl across the internet begins.  Some 5-100 milliseconds later your website of choice gets its pre-processed data at time T3.  Even though it's preprocessed, your favorite website has to unpack the data, store it in some sort of database, and push it onto their website at time T4. A sophisticated website might then force a refresh of your browser at time T4 to show you the new information.  But this forced refresh involves yet another slow crawl across the internet from where your website is based to your home computer, competing with your neighbor's 24/7 Netflix stream, etc.  Then your browser (with its 83 plugins and banner ads everywhere) has to refresh, and you finally see the update at T5. So, a thousand factors come into play, but even assuming that Google is doing the most expensive and labor-intensive thing it can and that all the networks between you and Google and the exchange are as short as they can be, you're not going to hear about a trade -- even a massive, market-moving trade -- for anywhere from 500 milliseconds to 5 seconds after T0.  And in a more realistic world that time will be 10-30 seconds. This is what Google calls ""Realtime"" on that disclaimer page, because they feel they're getting that info to you as fast as they possibly can (for free). Meanwhile, the computers that actually subscribe to an exchange heard about the trade way back at time T1 and acted on that information in a few microseconds.  That's almost certainly before T2 and definitely way way before T3.  The market for a particular instrument could change direction 5 times before Google even shows the first trade. So if you want true realtime access, you must subscribe to the exchange feed or, as keshlam suggests, sign up with a broker that provides its own optimized market feeds to you. (Note: This is not an endorsement of trading through brokers.)"
The best source of financial statements would be from the company in question. On corporate websites of public listed companies, you can find such financial statements uploaded in the Investor's Relations section of their website. If their company does not have an online presence, another alternative would be to go to the website of the exchange the company is trading in (e.g. NYSE or NASDAQ) for financial data. Reuters has a service you can subscribe to that will give you lots of Financial information that is not readily available in common feeds.  One of the things you can find is the listing/delist dates of stocks.  There are tools to build custom reports.  That would be a report you could write.  You can probably get the data for free through their rss feeds and on their website, but the custom reports is a paid feature. FWIW re-listing(listings that have been delisted but return to a status that they can be listed again) is pretty rare.  And I can not think of too many(any actually) penny stocks that have grown to be listed on a major exchange. I haven't seen one of these in quite some time. Back in the 1970s, maybe the 1980s, stock brokers would occasionally send their retail clients a complimentary copy once in a while. Also, I remember the local newspaper would offer a year-end edition for a few dollars (maybe $3) and that edition would include the newspaper company's name on the cover. They were very handy little guides measuring 5 1/2 x 8 (horizontal) with one line devoted to each company. They listed hundreds of publicly traded companies and had basic info on each company. As you stated, for further info you needed to go to the library and follow-up with the big S&P and/or Moody's manuals. That was long before the internet made such info available at the click of a button on a home computer! "This functionality is widely available, not only on brokerage sites, but also financial management and even financial information sites.  For instance, two of the latter are Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.  If you are logged in, they let you create ""portfolios"" listing your stocks and, optionally, the size of your holdings in that stock (which you don't need if you are just ""watching"" a stock).  Then you can visit the site at any time and see the current valuations." Try Google Finance Screener ; you will be able to filter for NASDAQ and NYSE exchanges. You're only counting one year.   Let's say 30 years of data, minutewise, for 2,000 stocks, and 50 characters per data line. That's 1.5TB of data.  Since the market has grown, that's an overestimate - 30 years ago there weren't 2,000 stocks in the NYSE - but it still gives us ballpark of roughly 1 TB.  Not an easy download. "In the US, stocks are listed on one exchange but can be traded on multiple venues.  You need to confirm exactly what your data is showing: a) trades on the primary-listed exchange; or b) trades made at any venue. Also, the trade condition codes are important.  Only certain trade condition codes contribute towards the day's open/high/low/close and some others only contribute towards the volume data.  The Consolidated Tape Association is very clear on which trades should contribute towards each value - but some vendors have their own interpretation (or just simply an erroneous interpretation of the specifications). It may surprise you to find that the majority of trading volume for many stocks is not on their primary-listed exchange.  For example, on 2 Mar 2015, NASDAQ:AAPL traded a total volume across all venues was 48096663 shares but trading on NASDAQ itself was 12050277 shares. Trades can be cancelled.  Some data vendors do not modify their data to reflect these busted trades.   Some data vendors also ""snapshot"" their feed at a particular point in time of the data.  Some exchanges can provide data (mainly corrections) 4-5 hours after the closing bell.  By snapshotting the data too early and throwing away any subsequent data is a typical cause of data discrepancies.   Some data vendors also round prices/volumes - but stocks don't just trade to two decimal places. So you may well be comparing two different sets of trades (with their own specific inclusion rules) against the same stock.  You need to confirm with your data sources exactly how they do things. Disclosure: Premium Data is an end-of-day daily data vendor." Take a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/stock-portfolio-manager/ It is an open source project aimed to manage your stock portfolio. I've had luck finding old stock information in the Google scanned newspaper archives. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a way to search exactly by date, but a little browsing /experimenting should get what you want. For instance, here's a source which shows the price to be 36 3/4 (as far as I can read anyway) on that date. Yup. What I wanted to know was where they are pulling it up from. Have casually used Google finance for personal investments, but they suck at corp actions. Not sure if they provide free APIs, but that would probably suck too! :D Ya, that's a lot of data - especially considering your relative lack of experience and the likely fact that you have no idea what to do with what you're given.  How do you even know you need minute or tick-based bid-ask data?    You can get a lot more than OHLC/V/Split/Dividend.  You can get:  * Book Value; * Dividend information (Amount, yield, ex date, pay date); * EBITDA; * EPS (current AND estimates); * Price/sales ratio; * Price/book value; * Price/earnings ratio; * PEG ratio; * Short ratio; * Market cap.  Among other things, all for free. It's difficult to compile free information because the large providers are not yet permitted to provide bulk data downloads by their sources.  As better advertising revenue arrangements that mimic youtube become more prevalent, this will assuredly change, based upon the trend. The data is available at money.msn.com.  Here's an example for ASX:TSE.  You can compare that to shares outstanding here. They've been improving the site incrementally over time and have recently added extensive non-US data.  Non-US listings weren't available until about 5 years ago. I haven't used their screener for some years because I've built my own custom tools, but I will tell you that with a little PHP knowledge, you can build a custom screener with just a few pages of code; besides, it wouldn't surprise me if their screener has increased in power.  It may have the filter you seek already conveniently prepared. Based upon the trend, one day bulk data downloads will be available much like how they are for US equities on finviz.com.  To do your part to hasten that wonderful day, I recommend turning off your adblocker on money.msn and clicking on a worthy advertisement.  With enough revenue, a data provider may finally be seduced into entering into better arrangements.  I'd much rather prefer downloading in bulk unadulterated than maintain a custom screener. money.msn has been my go to site for mult-year financials for more than a decade.  They even provide limited 10-year data which also has been expanded slowly over the years. Bloomberg is really just a huge database.  You can look up just about anything you need to know.  Launchpad is much better than the old NW market monitors.  The Excel API is useful.  If it wasn't where all my brokers are I would consider something different like Eikon.  It has some limitations but it's a useful system and parts of my job would be a pain without it. I also searched for some time before discovering Market Archive, which AFAIK is the most affordable option that basically gives you a massive multi-GB dump of data.  I needed sufficient data to build a model and didn't want to work through an API or have to hand-pick the securities to train from.  After trying to do this on my own by scraping Yahoo and using the various known tools, I decided my time was better spent not dealing with rate-limiting issues and parsing quirks and whatnot, so I just subscribed to Market Archive (they update the data daily). "&gt; 41x92x1820mm  1.6""x3.6""x71.7"", which is more or less the same as in the US.  2""x4"" is the rough cut board before drying and finishing. Anyone who regularly works with wood knows this. It's been the industry standard for decades."