[fractionalhare]

Because scraping data sucks, occasionally has compliance concerns, and is a different core competency from trading. They would rather offload all of the bullshit involved in maintaining a robust scraping operation than pay their research team to do it.

Time spent on maintaining a scraping operation is time taken away from optimizing your ETL process and producing actionable research for your trading team. You know how people pay to have their pipes unclogged even when they know how it's done? Same idea.