Download Historical Price Files
Historical prices are necessary if you’re to successfully evaluate fundamental and technical measures for a stock.
Fundamental and technical analysts (for the difference between the two, see Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) don’t have much in common other than the evaluation of historical prices to determine whether a stock is a buy, hold, or sell. Those who study fundamental measures use historical prices to identify typical P/E ratios and dividend yields for stocks. Because fundamental investors buy for the long term, they want historical prices going back several years. Conversely, technical analysts study the vagaries of price movement to try to determine where the price might go next. Technical analysis tends to the short term, so price charts might cover a few months or even a few hours. Smart investors combine the best of both of these methodologies to buy quality growth companies at good prices. Whether you want prices for days, months, or years, you can download a price spreadsheet from Yahoo! Finance.
When you open a web page for a stock at Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com), it’s easy to download the historical prices you want by following these steps:
Click the Historical Prices link in the navigation bar in the left margin to open the Historical Prices page.
Specify the start and end dates for your price history.
Select the Monthly option to download for each month: the opening price on the first trading day of the month, the closing price ...
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