Are you trying to find the best way to get cotton spot prices? Then this article will help you. Here, we explain to you how to get this information with an API.
Cotton is something we’ve all seen a million times a day. You may be unaware of how important this commodity is to the global economy. China produced the most cotton in 2019, accounting for 24 million tons. India came in second with 19 points, while the United States followed in third with around 19 points. This highlights the importance of investing in this product on a worldwide basis.
To do this right and get the best results possible, you need to stay updated on different types of rates and in diverse currencies. This will help you to understand how the market works and to foresee what will happen next. All this information can be obtained with an API, which is an interface that many websites use to connect to other sites and get data from there to then provide it to you.
To use it, you need to get the perfect software for you and then make the API call with the commodity and currency you wish to check. However, you should take into consideration that not every software is equal or gives the same information. Because of this, you need to be careful with which tool you use, so you don’t lose money or time.
How To Get Spot Rates
When we talk about spot rates, we refer to the current market rate at which a specific item, such as a product, security, or currency, can be bought or sold for immediate delivery. They enable you to have a better understanding of the business and forecast what will happen with a certain product in the future.
To get this type of rates, there are a ton of different softwares online for you to use. However, we will use Commodities-API to explain this because we think it’s the most complete one available at the moment. This is a free API that has a large list of currencies and commodities for you to choose from and delivers the data with a precision of 2 decimal points.
To get the information, you have to:
1. Go to www.commodities-API.com and sign up to obtain your personal API key.
2. Look for the cotton symbol (COTTON) and the currency you desire to obtain the information on.
3. Locate the metal and money in the list using these symbols, then choose the period of time you want. Make the API call after you’ve decided on them.
4. The website will deliver an API in a variety of programming languages that you may modify and use any way you see fit.
This data is shown in a variety of computer languages, the most common being JSON. The response will be something like this:
{
"success": true,
"timestamp": 1519296206,
"base": "COTTON",
"date": "2018-09-10",
"rates": {
"AUD": 1.566015,
"CAD": 1.560132,
"CHF": 1.154727,
"CNY": 7.827874,
"GBP": 0.882047,
"JPY": 132.360679,
"USD": 1.23396,
[...]
}
}
How Does This API Get The Information?
Commodities-API collects data from banks and the stock exchange and then uses it to give you the most reliable and secure data. Aside from that, this API uses bank-grade 256-bit SSL encryption, which ensures that your connection is secure at all times.
The API endpoints are used to convert currency and commodity prices, and they may be used to convert any amount from one currency to another, any commodity to any commodity, and any currency to any currency.
Also published on Medium.