FINRA Short Volume and OSV Vulnerability Data: Free APIs Developers Often Misread
Two widely used public datasets — FINRA's daily short volume file and OSV.dev's security advisory API — are freely accessible with a single HTTP request and require no account or API key. FINRA publishes per-symbol short volume data every trading day, but analysts frequently conflate it with short interest, which measures persistent open positions rather than intraday trading flow. Similarly, OSV.dev aggregates vulnerability advisories across major package ecosystems, and a scan of three commonly pinned library versions returned 70 advisories, including 24 rated High or Critical. Key pitfalls include silently dropping advisories with missing severity ratings and treating a version match as confirmed exploitability, when it only indicates a package is in scope for triage. Both datasets are authoritative but carry narrower meanings than their headline figures suggest, and accurate interpretation depends on understanding their underlying methodology.
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