wtf is finance-api-tool?

finance-api-tool is a command line utility built as part of the developer's master's project. It pulls financial and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) data for the companies in the S&P 500 stock index and saves the results to files you can open later. The tool offers a few distinct extraction options. It can pull historical quarterly financial data for S&P 500 companies, including balance sheets, cash flow statements, financial ratios, and dividend records, and save that data as CSV files. It can also pull historical monthly sustainability data, meaning ESG scores for each company as well as ESG scores for their peer groups, again saved as CSV. A separate option extracts just the current list of S&P 500 company tickers and saves it as a JSON file. To use it, you clone the repository, run npm install to set up dependencies, and then run npm run start. This opens a menu where you choose which extraction to run: financial data from Discounting Cashflows, ESG data from Yahoo Finance, S&P 500 ticker lists, ESG data from FMP (Financial Modeling Prep), or quitting the program. Output files land in one of several output folders depending on which option you picked. Two of the five options need a paid or registered API key to return full results. Financial data from Discounting Cashflows and ESG data from FMP both require you to sign up with those services and add your key to a .env configuration file. Without a key you still get data, but a limited amount. The Yahoo Finance and tickers options do not need a key. This is a research and data collection tool rather than an app with a visual interface. It would suit someone doing financial analysis, an ESG research project, or a student working on something similar to the original master's project, who wants ready made scripts for gathering this kind of stock market data instead of writing scraping code from scratch. It is written in TypeScript and run from the command line with Node.