Overview

A high-level guide to Benzinga’s real-time WebSocket data streams.

Benzinga’s WebSocket API delivers low-latency, push-based financial data directly to your application. Instead of repeatedly polling a REST endpoint, you open a single persistent connection and receive events the moment they’re available — analyst ratings, earnings results, news, transcripts, and more.

All streams share the same base endpoint, authentication model, and message envelope, so the patterns you learn on one stream apply everywhere.

How it works

1. Authenticate

   Obtain a Benzinga API token from the Benzinga Console and append it as a token query parameter when opening the connection.

2. Connect

   Open a WebSocket connection to the stream URL for the data you need — for example wss://api.benzinga.com/api/v1/analyst/insights/stream?token=YOUR_TOKEN.

3. Receive events

   Messages arrive as JSON objects with a consistent envelope: an id, api_version, kind, and a data block that carries the action (created, updated, or deleted) and the payload.

4. Keep the connection alive

   Send a ping plain-text frame periodically (every 30–60 s). The server responds with pong. The server also sends its own ping every 10 s — most WebSocket libraries handle this automatically.

Available streams

Analyst Insights

Real-time analyst ratings, price targets, and detailed recommendations as they’re published.

Ratings

Analyst rating changes and price target updates from major firms.

Consensus Ratings

Aggregated consensus ratings and price targets across all tracked analysts.

Earnings

Earnings announcements with EPS, revenue, estimates, and surprise metrics.

Bulls/Bears Say

Bull and bear case scenarios for securities, published in real time.

News

Breaking news articles and market updates from Benzinga’s editorial team.

Earnings Call Transcripts

Live earnings call transcripts delivered sentence-by-sentence as they’re spoken.

Message envelope

Every stream message follows the same top-level structure:

{
  "id": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
  "api_version": "websocket/v1",
  "kind": "<stream-type>",
  "data": {
    "action": "created",
    "id": "<record-id>",
    "timestamp": "2024-10-08T10:00:00Z",
    "content": { ... }
  }
}

Field	Description
id	Unique message ID — use this to deduplicate on reconnect
api_version	Protocol version of the message
kind	Identifies which stream the message came from
data.action	One of created, updated, or deleted
data.content	Stream-specific payload

Reference pages

Authentication

How to obtain and use your API token.

Supported Actions

ping and replay commands you can send on any stream.

Errors

Error codes and how to handle connection failures.