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find-top-performing-stocks

Installation

Adds this website's skill for your agents

 

Summary

Return the N highest-performing single stocks on Yahoo Finance (Top/Day Gainers) ranked by percent change, with price, change, percent change, volume, market cap, and exchange. Read-only.

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SKILL.md
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Find Top Performing Stocks (Yahoo Finance)

Purpose

Return the N highest-performing individual stocks on Yahoo Finance — the "Top Gainers" list ranked by intraday percent change. For each stock it returns symbol, company name, last price, absolute change, percent change, volume, market cap, and exchange. Read-only; never trades, logs in, or mutates anything.

Assumption made (no human to clarify): "highest performing single stocks" is interpreted as Yahoo Finance's headline Day Gainers list — the equities with the largest positive percent change in the current/most-recent US session — which is exactly what the site surfaces at /markets/stocks/gainers/. This list applies Yahoo's built-in liquidity/size floors (see Gotchas), so it is the "top performers among real, tradeable large/mid-cap names," not the absolute highest-percent movers including micro-caps. If you want the unfiltered highest movers, see the alternate scrIds in Gotchas.

When to Use

  • "Give me the top 5 (or N) performing / gaining stocks today."
  • Daily market-open or market-close monitoring of the biggest movers.
  • Seeding a watchlist or downstream analysis with the day's leaders.
  • Any flow that would otherwise scrape the Yahoo Finance "Top Gainers" table — the JSON API is faster, cheaper, and structurally stable.

Workflow

Yahoo Finance's "Top Gainers" page is a thin client over a public predefined-screener JSON API that needs no crumb, no auth, no cookies, and no residential proxy. A plain GET returns ranked results. Lead with the API; the browser path is a ~100× more expensive fallback that returns the identical data.

1. Call the predefined screener (recommended)

GET https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v1/finance/screener/predefined/saved
    ?scrIds=day_gainers
    &count=5
    &formatted=false
  • scrIds=day_gainers is the "Top Gainers" list (ranked by regularMarketChangePercent descending).
  • count=N caps how many rows you get back (use the N the user asked for).
  • formatted=false returns raw numeric values (32.7582). Omit it (or formatted=true) to get {raw, fmt} objects ({"raw":32.7582,"fmt":"+32.76%"}) if you want display strings.
  • query2.finance.yahoo.com is an interchangeable mirror.

In this sandbox use browse cloud fetch (works without proxies):

browse cloud fetch "https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v1/finance/screener/predefined/saved?scrIds=day_gainers&count=5&formatted=false"

The CLI wraps the response in an envelope { statusCode, headers, content }; the actual JSON is the content string.

2. Parse the result

The payload is finance.result[0] with:

  • title → "Day Gainers"
  • total → full count of matching stocks (e.g. 173); count → how many were returned
  • quotes[] → already sorted by regularMarketChangePercent descending

For each quotes[i] read:

  • symbol, shortName (fallback longName)
  • regularMarketPrice, regularMarketChange, regularMarketChangePercent
  • regularMarketVolume, marketCap, fullExchangeName
  • quoteType (will be "EQUITY" — predefined gainers are single stocks, not ETFs/funds), marketState
browse cloud fetch "https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v1/finance/screener/predefined/saved?scrIds=day_gainers&count=5&formatted=false" > /tmp/g.json
node -e '
const fs=require("fs");
const d=JSON.parse(JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync("/tmp/g.json","utf8")).content).finance.result[0];
console.log(d.title, "of", d.total);
d.quotes.slice(0,5).forEach((q,i)=>console.log(`${i+1}. ${q.symbol} ${q.shortName} ${q.regularMarketChangePercent.toFixed(2)}% @ ${q.regularMarketPrice}`));
'

3. Emit the ranked list

Take the first N quotes (already in descending-percent order) and shape them into the Expected Output below. Done — no pagination needed for a top-N request.

Browser fallback (only if the API is unreachable)

The API has no auth and no anti-bot, so the browser path should rarely be needed. If you must:

sid=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive | node -e "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
browse open "https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/gainers/" --remote --session "$sid"
browse wait load --remote --session "$sid"
browse wait timeout 3500 --remote --session "$sid"   # table hydrates after load
browse screenshot --remote --session "$sid" --path gainers.png
browse cloud sessions update "$sid" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

The page renders the same "Top Stock Gainers Today" table (Symbol / Name / Price / Change / Change % / Volume). The bare yahoofinance.com domain 301-redirects to finance.yahoo.com. Prefer scraping the screenshot/structured table over browse get markdown body — the markdown body is mostly Yahoo nav chrome and sometimes leads with an "Oops, something went wrong" fragment even when the table is present. Validated 2026-05-31: the rendered table (DELL 420.91 / +103.86 / +32.76% / 38.022M) matched the API row exactly.

Site-Specific Gotchas

  • day_gainers is filtered, not the raw top %. The predefined screener applies Yahoo's built-in floors (US region, minimum price, minimum intraday market cap, minimum volume). So the #1 row may be a large-cap up 30%, while a micro-cap up 85% won't appear. For broader/unfiltered movers use a different scrIds: small_cap_gainers (verified: surfaced REPL +85.68% vs. day_gainers' top of +32.76%), or build a custom screener (see crumb gotcha). Pick the list that matches the user's intent and state which list you used in your answer.
  • Predefined screener (/v1/finance/screener/predefined/saved) needs NO crumb. A plain GET returns 200 (verified with and without --proxies). It sets A1/A3 cookies in the response but does not require any on the request.
  • Custom screeners DO need a crumb + cookie. The unfiltered query endpoint POST /v1/finance/screener?crumb=... requires first fetching a session cookie from any Yahoo page, then GET /v1/test/getcrumb with that cookie. Only go down this path if a predefined scrIds doesn't fit; for "top N gainers" the predefined list is sufficient and crumb-free.
  • formatted=false vs default. Default responses wrap every numeric in {raw, fmt}. Pass formatted=false for plain numbers, which is simpler to parse.
  • count caps the rows; total is the full match count. count=5 returns 5 quotes but total may read 173 — don't mistake total for "stocks up today."
  • Results are pre-sorted descending by percent change. No client-side sort needed; quotes[0] is the top performer.
  • Market-closed = static, last-session values. On weekends/holidays marketState is CLOSED and the percentages reflect the last trading session's close (the list is stable, not live). Re-fetching returns identical numbers until the next session.
  • All rows are quoteType: "EQUITY" — the predefined gainers list is single stocks only, so it already satisfies "single stocks" (no ETFs/funds to filter out).
  • API host ≠ web host. The data lives on query1/query2.finance.yahoo.com; the human page is finance.yahoo.com. The bare yahoofinance.com 301-redirects to finance.yahoo.com.
  • No anti-bot wall observed. Pre-run probe reported no antibots; API fetched 200 both bare and with proxies; the gainers page loaded directly with no consent/captcha interstitial. --verified/--proxies were not required for any successful step.

Expected Output

{
  "source": "yahoo_finance",
  "list": "day_gainers",
  "list_title": "Day Gainers",
  "ranked_by": "regularMarketChangePercent_desc",
  "market_state": "CLOSED",
  "total_matching": 173,
  "as_of": "2026-05-31",
  "stocks": [
    {
      "rank": 1,
      "symbol": "DELL",
      "name": "Dell Technologies Inc.",
      "price": 420.91,
      "change": 103.86,
      "change_percent": 32.76,
      "volume": 38175314,
      "market_cap": 273409769472,
      "exchange": "NYSE",
      "quote_type": "EQUITY"
    },
    { "rank": 2, "symbol": "OKTA", "name": "Okta, Inc.", "price": 123.27, "change": 28.55, "change_percent": 30.14, "volume": 17181770, "market_cap": 21614956544, "exchange": "NasdaqGS", "quote_type": "EQUITY" },
    { "rank": 3, "symbol": "NTAP", "name": "NetApp, Inc.", "price": 174.29, "change": 31.89, "change_percent": 22.39, "volume": 15902415, "market_cap": 34519937024, "exchange": "NasdaqGS", "quote_type": "EQUITY" },
    { "rank": 4, "symbol": "TBBB", "name": "BBB Foods Inc.", "price": 37.82, "change": 5.09, "change_percent": 15.55, "volume": 6205247, "market_cap": 4457357312, "exchange": "NYSE", "quote_type": "EQUITY" },
    { "rank": 5, "symbol": "TEAM", "name": "Atlassian Corporation", "price": 107.61, "change": 14.32, "change_percent": 15.35, "volume": 13829691, "market_cap": 27307958272, "exchange": "NasdaqGS", "quote_type": "EQUITY" }
  ]
}

Note: the example values are a captured snapshot (US market CLOSED, 2026-05-31). Live values change each session, but the shape and the descending-percent ordering are stable.