StockXloader Features

• The system treats daily quotes and historical daily quotes of securities such as stocks, mutual funds and indexes.
• For a list of Yahoo tickers, you can download historical quotes for all those tickers many years back in time! And you can also download all the quotes for today, even if there are hundreds of tickers!
• StockXloader keeps four separate "region" lists — "EU", "US", "A" and "X" — that you can fill with arbitrarily many tickers from almost any stock exchange in the world. The reasons there are fours lists are:
  • Due to time zone differences, you will want to differentiate your downloads, so you can make sure that the exchange has closed when you download the quotes for today.
  • While only one or two regions in the world may be your trading interest, it is extremely convenient to have extra lists for temporary usage, such as when picking up a new ticker for which you want to download a few years of data.
• For each ticker list, StockXloader keeps track of the last date you successfully downloaded data (really got some data, not just attempted a download!). All this information is kept visually updated in a live table so you immediately know the status.
• For all dates of last download, you can back any of them as much as you need — days, months, years — for building a historical database!
• StockXloader provides you with very detailed progress information concerning how the download and conversion proceeds — two progress bars, one for the number of finished files, the other for the "current" file. 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 dates, empty tickers, error conditions etcetera.
• For Yahoo historical quotes, StockXloader warns you about those tickers that do not have any data or do not have as recent quotes as the most recent ticker has — that protects you from being mislead, so that you can choose to set the date back and download again at a later time when the Yahoo databases have been updated. This way, you minimize the risk of getting "holes" in your own quote database. See this example of a screen shot.
• After all the files have been downloaded, they are processed to fit the import specifications for ProTA and the character set used in Mac OS X. The resulting information is assembled into a single file to be automatically imported into the database of ProTA. The processing of each file includes:
  • pattern matchings to search and verify fields, and to find out what the latest date is that really had some data;
  • date interpretations and conversions, using 4-digit years in a format that is independent of your preferred date format in ProTA;
  • creating the appropriate columns from file content and file name;
  • the tickers can (optionally) be converted from the Yahoo ticker format to the commonly used format at the stock exchange;
  • 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;
  • 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.
  • insertion of special control lines at the beginning of the file to import—which instructs ProTA to use the correct column settings, delimiter and number format, plus it specifies a named settings format that e.g can associate a named ticker mappings file. (Read more about that feature in the User Guide.)
• Help buttons are provided that guide you right where you might need the guidance, and throughout the application there is an extensive set of error handling functionality for all conceivable cases.
• StockXloader is extremely fast since it exploits many highly efficient Unix routines at the core of Mac OS X, while at the same time exploiting the best of the Mac OS X Aqua/Quartz for its graphical user interface. StockXloader is a so called "universal binary", which means that it is optimized for both PowerPC and Intel based Mac.