How Downloading Financial Data Could Help Your Investments
Downloading raw financial and market data for the stocks you follow to your own computer gives you ability to manipulate it in any way you'd like and to create your own unique trading systems. It could give you a chance to test systems and trading methods with historical data and choose the one that best suits your style and vision toward the financial market.
The data could be downloaded from the web as a comma separated file (.csv) and then imported in your application, be it excel or any other of similar kind. The usual problem with the download link the websites offer is that the file you download will contain only the types of data the website decided to put in. As with the data you could download from the Quotes section of financial area of Yahoo - the download link gives you a file with the company stock symbol, the price of the last deal, the time of the last deal, the change (in percent), open price, high,low and volume. These data types are determined by the values sent to the server through the link which in this case are "sl1d1t1c1ohgv". The result would be a row similar to the following one:
"A",30.10,"2/16/2010","1:39pm",+0.74,30.65,30.34,30.12,10384774
This is a row about the Agilent Technologies Inc price data derived for February, 16th.
The Yahoo interface however has a much wider capabilities and it could be useful to know them. When you search on the net for "downloading financial data" you would be able to easy find articles where the the different parameters are explained in deep (such as the "Download Financial Data" one). Some of them are the following:
etc.
So a request to an url like http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=A+AA+AAPL&f=sohgl1v&e=.csv will give you a.csv file with the following content:
"A",30.65,30.34,30.12,30.11,10444134
"AA",13.33,13.62,13.35,13.61,63493768
"AAPL",201.94,203.69,201.52,203.13,13589024
Notice how the particular companies whose stock you would like to get the data for are written with a plus sign between them. That way you can get data for almost any stock you want. You can also download data for all companies in indexes such as S&P500 - the symbol for that would be "@%5EGSPC" which is to be put instead of the companies symbols in the URL. Yahoo has some limitations to the number of companies you can download data at once so you should respect that number.
The data could be downloaded directly to your favorite application. On the net there are some already prepared.xls files like the Yahoo-download.xls which could be found on the gummy-stuff site. If you know how to make your own macros in.xls or similar files you can perfectly organize your own system and track the data you want.
The data could be downloaded from the web as a comma separated file (.csv) and then imported in your application, be it excel or any other of similar kind. The usual problem with the download link the websites offer is that the file you download will contain only the types of data the website decided to put in. As with the data you could download from the Quotes section of financial area of Yahoo - the download link gives you a file with the company stock symbol, the price of the last deal, the time of the last deal, the change (in percent), open price, high,low and volume. These data types are determined by the values sent to the server through the link which in this case are "sl1d1t1c1ohgv". The result would be a row similar to the following one:
"A",30.10,"2/16/2010","1:39pm",+0.74,30.65,30.34,30.12,10384774
This is a row about the Agilent Technologies Inc price data derived for February, 16th.
The Yahoo interface however has a much wider capabilities and it could be useful to know them. When you search on the net for "downloading financial data" you would be able to easy find articles where the the different parameters are explained in deep (such as the "Download Financial Data" one). Some of them are the following:
- a - ask price
- b - bid price
- a5 - ask size
- b6 - bid size
- d - Divident/share
- e - Earnings/share
- d1 - Last trade date
- g - Day's low
- h - Day's high
etc.
So a request to an url like http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=A+AA+AAPL&f=sohgl1v&e=.csv will give you a.csv file with the following content:
"A",30.65,30.34,30.12,30.11,10444134
"AA",13.33,13.62,13.35,13.61,63493768
"AAPL",201.94,203.69,201.52,203.13,13589024
Notice how the particular companies whose stock you would like to get the data for are written with a plus sign between them. That way you can get data for almost any stock you want. You can also download data for all companies in indexes such as S&P500 - the symbol for that would be "@%5EGSPC" which is to be put instead of the companies symbols in the URL. Yahoo has some limitations to the number of companies you can download data at once so you should respect that number.
The data could be downloaded directly to your favorite application. On the net there are some already prepared.xls files like the Yahoo-download.xls which could be found on the gummy-stuff site. If you know how to make your own macros in.xls or similar files you can perfectly organize your own system and track the data you want.
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