FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Answer: It is Yahoo that may or may not support a specific market or a certain security. StockXloader will download data for any market for which Yahoo has data. See the next question:

Answer: You can get quotes from any exchange for which Yahoo carry data. Choose the menu item 'Tools > Yahoo Web Locations > Exchanges' to see the suffix used for different exchanges. If you can't find it on Yahoo, then StockXloader can't download from it. And conversely, if you can find tickers for that exchange on Yahoo, then StockXloader can download those tickers.

Answer: It is Yahoo that may or may not support a specific market or a certain security. StockXloader will download data for any market for which Yahoo has data. See the previous question for what exchanges there are data. Certain securities, such as options, can be tricky to find, and BragIt can not help you with that — you will have to search around at Yahoo to see if it is there. For most options, there is no historical data.

Answer: You simply edit one of the existing lists: the EU, US, A or X-list.

Answer: As yet, there is no automatic method from Yahoo to get all tickers for an exchange. For certain indexes, however, there should be information about which shares are included in the index computation, by following the procedure:

Use the menu item 'Tools > Yahoo Web Locations > Major World Indices'. Then click your way a few times to get to the index you are interested in. Example: the page http://finance.yahoo.com/intlindices?e=asia lists Asian indexes, where one of them is '^HSI' for Hang Seng. Click on 'Components' to see its components (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EHSI). For some indexes, however, such as Nikkei 225, Yahoo doesn't list its components as yet.

When you have found the interesting tickers, enter them in one of the ticker lists. Also, you can look at a site for your market that lists interesting stocks. (Your broker probably has a good site.) When you have identified the stocks you want to monitor, search for the corresponding tickers at Yahoo (use the menu item 'Tools > Yahoo Web Locations > Ticker Symbol Lookup' from within StockXloader).

Although StockXloader can use a list with thousands of tickers, it is not advisable to do so! Even if the computer manages it, you will choke! Beware that name changes, company merges, splits, fusions, etcetera are very common. If you try to keep thousands of tickers up to date, you are sure in for late evenings! In other words: I recommend you to deal with a more reasonably sized list (perhaps a hundred or so). If interest changes, it is pretty easy to enter some new tickers in the X-list and just download those for a few years of data.

Answer:That's what the X-list is for: think of the list [X] as a temporary extra list for getting quotes for some individual ticker you may be interested in—it makes it easy to "catch up" on a single ticker or a few tickers without having to modify any of the other lists.

Answer: ProTA and StockXloader are intended for end-of-day quotes, but you can take "snapshots" during a day. See the next question for a more refined question.

Clarification of question: Can each "snapshot" over-ride a previous "snapshot" and appear in ProTA as the most current snapshot? I would like to be able to take a snapshot 30 minutes before closing and then a snapshot after closing and have the last snapshot be updated in ProTA as the final opening, closing, etc for each stock.

Answer: Yes! ProTA has a setting that controls whether new values will replace earlier values or not. Read Chapter 6 in the User Guide for StockXloader; it tells you how to automatically control this.

You use the source 'YahooCurrent' in StockXloader for getting the most recent quotes of the day. However, as for volume, it varies — most tickers do not get volume info during the day, but only in the historical database, whereas some (^DJI e.g) also get volume during the current day. So it may be wise to re-download historical data later if you want to also get volume.

Answer: First of all, if you are looking at changes in ProTA, you must set its preference so that new values replace old values. Read Chapter 6 in the User Guide for StockXloader; it tells you how to automatically control this.
You can see the exact time of day of the quote by doing:
Choose the menu item 'Tools > StockXloader Files'. Then open the folder 'Temporary quote files'. Open the particular file for the day (which is named like 'Yahoo20070313(US).csv') in a text editor, such as TextEdit. You can see the time of day there, such as "3:25pm". In successive downloads, you can verify that this time changes, provided there is any trading in this security.

If the time really does not change, then go to Yahoo and manually check what is happening — maybe there is no trading in this security, or Yahoo will not provide new values right now for this ticker for whatever reason. Normally, it will change.

Answer: It is Yahoo, or their data provider, that may or may not support historical data for a specific security. StockXloader will download data for any market for which Yahoo has data. To find out if the problem is with Yahoo or StockXloader, follow the procedure in the Troubleshooting, available from the Help menu.

Answer: It is Yahoo, or their data provider, that may or may not support historical data for a specific security. StockXloader will download data for any market for which Yahoo has data. To find out if the problem is with Yahoo or StockXloader, follow the procedure in the Troubleshooting, available from the Help menu.

Answer: If the content of the data is not what you expected, follow the procedure in the Troubleshooting, available from the Help menu.