Issues with Yahoo

[earik]

Hi All,

As many of you know, things have gotten a little bumpy when downloading the free stock quotes that Yahoo offers. Unfortunately, this appears to have been done on purpose by Yahoo. I suspect that they don't want 3rd party programs to download history from their site, and want people to do it by hand so that they can serve up ads, etc. There also may be pressure on them from the exchanges, who don't like them redistributing data in the way that they've done. As such, they've implemented some pretty crazy security measures on their new site to defeat auto-downloading routines. I gave it a pretty good shot, but still came up short.

Anyway, the version 2.29 of W59 does have a fix for Yahoo, but the catch is that we can only download 6 months of data now, rather than the previous 10+ years. So you will still be able to update your charts, but you won't get to start out with much history. Luckily, there IS a workaround to this, and you only have to do it one time when setting up a new chart. It requires downloading the initial batch of history by hand. Here's how:

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1) Go to Wave59 and click file - working directory. Note the location.

2) Pull up a web browser, and enter this URL to get to Yahoo's historical quotes page: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/<YOUR TICKER>/history . You would replace <YOUR TICKER> with the ticker symbol for your stock. So if you wanted quotes for AAPL, you would enter the URL like this: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/history

3) There is a "time period" drop down box on that page. Click that and choose "MAX". Then click "Apply". The page will be reloaded.

4) Now look for the "Download Data" link, to the right of where you just were. Clicking that will download a text file with a bunch of history.

5) This file is a .csv file. You have to turn it into a .txt file. It's just an extension issue. If you don't know how to do that, you can make a brand new .txt file (right-click in the folder, then click New - Text Document, and name it with the symbol name), and then copy the entire contents of the csv file over and save.

6) Finally, copy the file, and move it to the yahoo folder in your working directory, which you located in step 1. It will be in the /data/yahoo folder inside that working directory.
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Once you've done that, you will be able to update the file each day just as before, and will be able to go back as far as Yahoo's database allows.

I'll keep fooling around with this and will hopefully be able to figure a way out to download more than 6-months. Sorry for the trouble with this one. This is one of the issues with free data, unfortunately.

Regards,

Earik

[soldado1976]

Earik I just let go of my data provider and am going to go with yahoo - unless there has not been an update to where it can pull more than 6 months.

Thanks - would you ever be able to do a Tradestation data feed?

[earik]

Hi Soldado,

Yahoo and Google can both be sketchy. At one time they used to embrace big dowloads of financial data, but that has changed. I suspect the exchanges gave them some pushback over it. Because of that, it's gotten harder to count on them. Yahoo has 6 months to a year, but sometimes doesn't work at all. Google still seems to be OK. I'm trying to find a good, low-cost alternative, but it hasn't been easy.

TradeStation locked all their data up years ago, so unless something has changed recently, there's no way to lock onto them in the way that W59 would need. IQFeed is still the best option, and I've been spending a ton of time getting Oanda up to snuff for an upcoming release, so if you're a Forex trader, that would also be a possibility.

Earik

[soldado1976]

Bummer I just let IQFEED lapse. I have to run on a hotspot and it has been sketchy as can be thru that. No sense paying the dues if it sux

[kjociii]

You can always write an Easylanguage script to output Tradestation data to an ASCII file and then read it into W59.

Kenn