Features

• Imports downloaded and converted data into ProTA or MS Excel or iWork Numbers, or it provides a text file so that you can easily import the data into some other application. You set your choice in Preferences.
• Fetches historical quotes of securities such as stocks, mutual funds and indexes, and gets "snapshots" of the latest price values for today (delayed intraday values). All this works smoothly for hundreds (or even thousands) of ticker symbols. With the combination of your external application and StockXloader you can build an arbitrarily large database of ticker symbols containing historical quotes for the open/high/low/close of each day, plus current-day snapshots.
• Has a ticker list editor, with which you can create any number of lists containing ticker symbols. You set the category of each symbol, such as stock, index, mutual fund, future. For each ticker symbol, you can map it to a name you prefer to use instead of the Yahoo symbol, and you can also give its full security name, supply a comment, disable or enable this particular symbol in this particular list.
• Ticker lists can be printed onto paper or to pdf.
• All dates and times are given in the format and in the time zone your computer is set to, regardless of which stock exchange in the world the trade times refer to. These dates and times are tracked for each individual ticker symbol, and they are the dates/times of trades at the exchange, not just the date/time you downloaded data.
• StockXloader attempts to get data from the day after the last historical date for each ticker symbol. So even if you get snapshots during the day (which are not necessarily end-of-day quotes), it will fetch the historical quotes for that day when they are available. Historical quotes often carry volume information whereas snapshots usually don't, and the open value for historical quotes is often more correct than that given by the snapshot, so this ensures that your database of quotes don't miss important information.
• You can back any of the historical dates as much as you need — days, months, years, should you want to re-download old data.
• StockXloader provides you with very detailed progress information concerning how the download and conversion proceeds. In addition, it provides a Message Log drawer that gradually fills up with various information as to how much has been downloaded, what is currently being processed, missing data, error conditions etcetera.
• A toolbar provides you with some commonly used tools. One of them is the Yahoo popup menu that opens various Yahoo web pages. Perhaps the nicest one is the ability to bring up the Yahoo web page that corresponds to the currently selected ticker symbol, see this screen shot.
• All files are processed and assembled into a single file to be automatically imported into your program. For ProTA, there are some special treatments that include:
  • processing the data to fit the import specifications for ProTA and the character set it uses;
  • insertion of special control lines at the beginning of the file that instructs ProTA how dates and numbers shall be interpreted, which columns contain what and its delimiter, if new symbols should cause ProTA to automatically create new files (or show a prompt or skip), and if data for existing dates should be replaced or skipped. The last two items are settable in the Preferences, i.e you have full control over how new symbols and existing dates are treated. Also, it specifies a named settings format that can be used inside ProTA for further control. The date format that StockXloader uses in the generated file is independent of your preferred date format in ProTA.
  • insertion of special type codes in a ProTA control field that informs ProTA which tickers are stocks, which are funds, and which are indexes, options or futures, so that any new ticker is created in the right category by ProTA. On subsequent downloads, the ticker category is automatically identified so that it knows which ticker to update.
  • the full security names, obtained from the ticker files, are inserted into a column of the file to import into ProTA, so that ProTA automatically gets the full security names;
• There are lots of so called Tool Tips that show up gently for a brief moment when you hover the mouse over an item, such as a column heading in a table. These are short explanatory texts that tell you what the item is used for or how you accomplish a task. This makes the application easy to understand without having to read the user guide.
• Search for updates to StockXloader is automatic, and it can automatically download the new version, install it, and relaunch the application. This is in part made possible by the so called Sparkle framework.
• On security: StockXloader 4 is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate. In Mountain Lion or later, the Gatekeeper will check this cryptographic signature, and this guarantees that this software comes from an identified developer, and has not been modified on the way to you. The automatic software update by Sparkle also supports this, making sure that also the update to a new version is not a source from malicious intruders.
• On technology: StockXloader is coded with the latest tools from Apple, adhering to Apple's rules. This makes it a strong base for survival in future versions of Mac OS X. It is a so called Cocoa application, coded in Objective-C 2.0. It exploits some highly efficient Unix routines at the core of Mac OS X. This combination has made it possible to achieve very fast downloading, a responsive GUI, robustness, and at the same time ensuring an up-to-date graphical user interface. All text, icons and toolbar images are optimized for Retina screens.