Sebastian Schweer has a nice post on using the request package to query an online financial service and download current stock quotes. That data is placed in an Org table along with certain historical data (such as purchase date and original cost) and used to calculate the current value of his stock holdings. The table can, of course, be exported to produce a nicely formatted report.
This post is similar to the one by Charl Botha that I wrote about previously. If you need to programmatically retrieve data from a restful website, you should carefully study these two posts. They show how to use the request package and then parse out the data. Sadly, I haven’t had a need to use these techniques but I’m really looking forward to when I do. Request, let-list, and the rest are tools that I’m dying to try out.
UPDATE : Added link to Sastibe’s post.