Ask HN: A question about historical stock data.

3 points by ncarlson ↗ HN
Hi,

I have an interesting idea for a web app geared towards investors. However, the web app would require an immense amount of historical financial data. Does anyone know the common way to go about requesting historical stock data?

The web app would also require historical financial data (read: operating metrics) for nearly every public company on the planet. Is there a company that aggregates this data, or would I need to find and parse it myself?

Thanks for the help!

4 comments

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uh, there's some perl CPAN modules that do that. a long time ago I wrote a little thingr to simulate 'if my program had been buying/selling stocks in this manner from date x to date y, at commission z, how much would I make/lose?' - I used the CPAN modules which pulled from yahoo, I think. it was pretty simple stuff.

ah yes, here:

Finance::QuoteHist

http://search.cpan.org/~msisk/Finance-QuoteHist-1.12/lib/Fin...

check it out. if you don't like perl, I'm sure you can pull it apart and figure out where it gets the data.

You are going to want to buy the historical data wholesale. Then augment it with eoddata or some such.