Support & Troubleshooting

If you have a question, it may be good to first take a look at the Frequently Asked Questions. Also, there is the Yahoo Finance Help available from the menu Yahoo > Yahoo Finance Help. If you experience problems not answered by these pages, the following serves as a way to pinpoint what the problem might be, and possibly to provide a solution.

StockXloader depends on a functioning chain all the way from databases at the stock exchanges via various service providers and the internet, and finally to your computer. This means that there are zillions of possible problems that might occur, only a few of which can be dealt with by StockXloader. StockXloader will sense basic internet problems (such as you have no internet connection, or timeout at the Yahoo server) and it tells you about that in the Message Log. For other types of errors, it might tell you what the problem is, or simply show an error code.

Before you report any problems to BragIt, you should make sure to isolate where the problem might be, and often the problem is simply that the quote data at Yahoo is not yet updated, or the ticker symbol no longer exists.

Contents

• Yahoo problems
  • Connect problem
  • Ticker symbol problem
  • Content problem
• Crashes, or "unexpectedly quit", or ...
• Direct support

Yahoo problems

Connect problem[BACK]

If StockXloader does not seem to be able to connect to the server:

1. Choose Yahoo -> Home Page. If it can not be reached, proceed with step 2, otherwise proceed with Ticker symbol problem.
2. Use your regular browser and go to http://finance.yahoo.com. If it can not be reached, the server or network is down (no point in reporting this to BragIt). If it can be reached, but StockXloader can not take you there, report the problem to BragIt.

Ticker symbol problem[BACK]

If StockXloader does not seem to be able to find your ticker symbol, do the following:

1. At http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup, search for a ticker symbol that you are certain of is the correct ticker symbol, in order to find its data. If you can not get any data for the ticker symbol, there is a problem at Yahoo (no point in reporting this to BragIt).
2. If it was "Snapshots" you had trouble with, click the link "Download Data (delayed)" below the table on the web page.

   If that does not work, or there is no such link, you have the wrong ticker symbol, or there is some problem at the Yahoo server, or Yahoo is not licensed to provide downloadable data. (As of this writing, Yahoo is not licensed to offer downloadable data for Dow Jones indexes, even if they can show you a chart of them (see FAQ).)

   If that does work, but StockXloader could not download the corresponding file, then there is some problem with StockXloader, which you can report.

3. If it was "Historical" you had trouble with, click on the link " Historical Prices " on the left side of the web page.

   If that does not work, or there is no such link, you have the wrong ticker symbol or there is some problem at the Yahoo server, or they don't offer historical data. (For instance, as of this writing, Yahoo does not carry historical data for most currencies, metals and options.)

   If that does work, enter the time period you were interested in and click the Get Prices button. Then click on the link "Download to Spreadsheet" below the table on the web page.

   If that does not work, or there is no such link, there is some problem at the Yahoo server, or Yahoo is not licensed to provide downloadable data. StockXloader will not be able to do anything about that, since it needs the downloadable data, not just some web page that shows some numbers. (As of this writing, Yahoo is not licensed to offer downloadable data for Dow Jones indexes, even if they can show you a limited table with some data (see FAQ).) If that worked, but StockXloader could not download the corresponding file, then there is some problem with StockXloader, which you can report.

Content problem[BACK]

If If it does connect to the server, but the content of the data is not what you think it should have been, do the following::

1. Go to the server as described above under Connect problem and find the data you were looking for. If the data at the server is not the same as the data that StockXloader just downloaded, then there may be some problem with StockXloader. But before reporting a problem, download the data again from within StockXloader (you may need to back the Last Date to get historical data, and you can do that by double-clicking the Last Date column for the symbol). This ensures that the download is as recent as possible. Sometimes it happens that the last day's historical data is missing on some downloads, but the next time you download, the data is there again! And sometime later it is gone again! This problem has been reported to Yahoo, but it is likely that the problem can still occur sometimes.

   If the data at Yahoo is different from the data that was imported into your program, then proceed with step 3. Otherwise, if the data that StockXloader imported to your program is the same, but you still think it is wrong, then proceed with step 2.

2. If the data at the Yahoo server is the same as the data that StockXloader downloaded and imported into your program, but you still think it is wrong, such as missing data, then you might report the data problem to Yahoo.

   You can report Yahoo data problems at the Yahoo! Answers Finance Help Community by registering and participate. Post under the category Yahoo! Products > Yahoo! Finance.

3. In rare cases when there are problems at the server, these problems might later be corrected. If you had previously downloaded these incorrect historical data, and then downloaded and imported the corrected data, everything should be ok. However, if it is ProTA you import data into, you must make sure to set the Preferences to replace existing dates. (You do this in StockXloader's Preferences for ProTA, since it will be communicated to ProTA.)
4. You should be aware of the fact that the type of data Yahoo carry may be different for different stock exchanges and different tickers, and it may be different for snapshot (current day) data as compared with historical data. For instance, some tickers may miss one of 'open/high/low/volume' in either historical data or current day data; especially 'open' and 'volume' or prone to be left out from the kind of data their data vendor offers.
5. A relatively common mistake is to set the category wrong for a security, because when it is imported into ProTA, it will put the symbol in the given category, and if it is an index but you marked it as a stock, you might think it has "disappeared". Another possible mistake is when you have tickers that are exactly the same except that they have different stock exchange suffixes (such as '.DE' for Xetra), and you have tick-marked Strip stock-exchange suffix, then these different securities will be merged into one when imported into ProTA, unless you have mapped them to different names.

Crashes, or "unexpectedly quit", or ...[BACK]

Generally, such behavior may be caused by something "unhealthy" in your machine, and usually, it can be "cleaned" in one of several ways. The following are some standard techniques, in order of simplicity and priority:

1. Repair permissions and restart: Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) and click "Repair Disk Permissions". It can also be a good idea to click "Verify Disk" to check if it is healthy. Restart your Mac. This is completely harmless.
2. Delete the preferences file: In certain cases, such as system crashes or sudden loss of power, certain preference files can become "corrupt", which means that some data in them become wrong. The preference file for StockXloader can be deleted without loss of important data, although you might need to restore some things, such as which program should import the data. Rather than really delete the preferences file, we will put it into Trash so it can be restored if we want: Do as follows:
   1. Quit StockXloader 4 (if it was running)
   2. Delete (put into Trash) the following plist file: /Users/<user>/Library/Preferences/com.bragit.StockXloader4.plist
   3. Start StockXloader 4. You may need to recreate some settings.
   4. If it did not cure the problem, but you later find another cure, you can restore your old preferences by bringing back the plist file from Trash, but make sure StockXloader is not running while doing that.
3. Create a new account: If nothing seems to work, there is a possibility that something in your account is causing trouble. One way to find out that is to create a new test account. Do as follows:
   1. Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups. Click on the lock in the lower left corner and Authenticate yourself.
   2. Click '+' to add a new test user. Name it any way you like, since you can later delete the entire test user and all files created within it (which you can do by clicking the '–' sign).
   3. Log in as the new test user. (Can be done either by logging out and then in again as the new user, or better yet if you have fast user switching enabled (which can be enabled under Users & Groups > Login Options) then you can just choose the new user in the main menu (just left of the spotlight icon).)
   4. Start StockXloader. (It will now run in evaluation mode even if you have a license for it.)
   5. If the error is gone here with the test user, then there must be something wrong with your regular user. It is basically beyond the support from BragIt to solve that problem. You can try to find what it is that causes trouble, such as some plugin, some scripting addition, some preference pane (all in your Library in a folder named just like that). (To access your Library (which is hidden in Lion and later versions of Mac OS): In Finder, hold the option key and click the Go menu choosing Library.) You can also start to use the new account as your regular account, but if so, you would probably want to make a new account with the same name as your original account; that can be a bit tricky, since you would have to archive your original account before creating a new one with the same name.

If you have done all the above, and it still crashes, then, before you report this to BragIt, it is very important to write down a very detailed procedure that can reproduce the problem, otherwise it is pretty hopeless to find the bug. We need to know the computer, the version of Mac OS, what precautions you have done to isolate the problem, the detailed procedure that reproduces the problem. Possibly, you might need to also include the ticker list you have been using (preferably minimized to a test list), and possibly some screen capture. Also, the Consol (under Applications/Utilities) sometimes provides some useful hints about what the problem can be.

Direct support[BACK]

If you have analyzed the problem in depth, considering all the methods mentioned above, but still can not solve the problem, you may need to send a support mail. When sending such a mail, include the name you used to register the software, the version you are using, the Mac OS version, the computer, any non-standard issues such as booting from a partition other than the first partition of the startup disk, and if your user data resides on another volume, or other special customization of the Mac OS installation. Depending on the type of problem, it may also be useful to know the language your Mac OS is set to, and perhaps also what date format it is set to. Screen shots might help if there are error boxes. To save any messages in the Message Log drawer, you can choose File -> Save Message Log..., which will save a plain text file with all the contents of the Message Log. If it is a crash issue, you must provide a detailed description about when/how it occurred, preferably with a procedure that can reproduce the fault. Support mail can be sent to: