Messages: What Members Are Asking On-Line

On-Line Historical Prices

I am trying to find daily historical stock prices to develop a cost basis for tax purposes. Do you know of a Web site where I could obtain this data?

—A B.
via E-mail

CI Editors respond: We featured a comparison of historical quote providers in the September/October 2002 issue of Computerized Investing. The comparison examined 19 vendors that provide past price, volume, and breadth statistics on stocks, indexes, mutual funds, options or futures.

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To look up individual company historical quotes you should also consider Yahoo! Finance. This Web site allows users to pull up stock histories dating back to 1970 at no cost. Historical quote data is presented in tabular form in user-selected time frames—daily, weekly, and monthly. You can even look up historical dividend payments. Yahoo! Finance provides a split- and dividend-adjusted close as well as unadjusted open, high, low and close.

Once on the Historical Quotes page, you may choose the date range of the data displayed, change the ticker symbol query, or switch to a different time-frame format. If the data requested is beyond the range of historical quotes available through Yahoo! Finance, all available data within the range will be displayed. While historical quotes typically do not go back further than 1970, we found data for IBM that went back to 1962.

There is currently no restriction to the amount of historical quote data you can request; however, only 200 rows will be displayed at a time. Links to “Previous 200 records” and “Next 200 records” are available at the bottom of the table, which may be used to access the additional data requested. You also have the option to download in spreadsheet format.

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A number of useful utilities have been developed to retrieve data from Yahoo! Finance. XLQ by QMatix is a favorite around the office. The program delivers live and historical stock data from sources such a Yahoo! Finance directly into an Excel spreadsheet. XLQ runs in the background and provides users with 85 different spreadsheet formulae that can pull a variety of current and past stock data directly into a spreadsheet. These formulae allow users to design portfolio managers and financial spreadsheets for stock analysis that update automatically.

A utility enables users to view the data directly; pull quotes from multiple sources; produce intraday logs for multiple symbols; and view historical daily, weekly and monthly data. XLQ is a shareware program that can be downloaded and tested for 45 days at no cost. After that, the cost is $35 and includes free future upgrades.