@TalFishman: I have no idea if the data requested in this question are available even for a fee.

As I tried to say in the comments, I voted to close because I thought I was following the guidelines from the FAQ and meta, even though I agree more with Shane's answer in the meta question I linked to.

I do think the OP's question is legitimate because I would encounter data requests like that when I was a research analyst at the Federal Reserve.

@JoshuaUlrich I also think it is likely legitimate, provided the OP does not insist on the data being free.

@JoshuaUlrich I updated my question to clarify my view on free vs. non-free data requests.

@TalFishman Thank you. I'd remove my vote-to-close if I could...

Do you think the FAQ should be updated? Maybe change the link to the canonical data question to, "Where can I find free data?"?

@JoshuaUlrich done

@TalFishman Awesome. Thanks for all your work on quantSE!

@JoshuaUlrich No problem, thanks to you, too.

FYI daily visits and question down-voting are both at all time highs. Incidentally, there does seem to be a correlation. For daily visits, I am excluding one-off surges from news.ycombinator.com.

That's encouraging and discouraging. We need to convert some of those daily visits to question-askers.

Converting visits from a news aggregator (like Hacker News) is almost impossible. This has been an issue ever since SlashDot. You're more likely to get converts from organic search. Also, as most of the comments on HN have shown, those temporary visitors aren't quants either. And we definitely don't need a surge in non-quants on here!

@chrisaycock The proportion of traffic coming from organic search has also been on the rise. A small number of those are true quants, and we do seem to be getting a trickle of new high-quality users, such as 1920, 1969, 1988.