Question

Answer

• Current Quotes
• Historical Data
• Fundamental Data
• Industry and Sector

See Also: Yahoo! Finance Free Data Source

The Download Data window, which can be accessed by clicking on the Download Data button in the main toolbar now provides a Source of "Yahoo! Finance" as can be seen below.  Yahoo! Finance now supports three types of downloads: "Historical Quotes", "Fundamental Data", and "Current Quotes".  These three typesare discussed below.

Historical Data
The Data Download window "Source Menu" lists "Yahoo Finance" as a source for retrieving daily, weekly, or monthly historical data from the Yahoo Finance web site. End-of-Day users of Investor/RT will find this a convenience and reliable source of historical data. The latest daily bar data from Yahoo updates quotepages, portfolios, etc. Historical downloading from Yahoo is also available in the free demonstration version of Investor/RT so that evaluators of the Investor/RT product may update daily, weekly, monthly charts of the Dow Jones 30 Industrial stocks setup in the demonstration version.

An historical download during the session will not provide the current day's data.  It is recommended that users follow an historical download with a current quotes download, as the current quote will get the data for the current day.  Also, once an historical download has been performed on a large group of symbols, the much faster "current quotes" download can be performed once per day to keep the daily data complete and up-to-date.  See below for more details on current quote downloads.

Current Quotes
The Current quote download presently requests up to 200 symbols at a time from Yahoo! Finance. If you request current quotes on a page containing more than 200 instruments, Investor/RT will issue multiple requests of 200 each to update all stocks and indexes in the source quotepage quickly. The Yahoo! current quote download supports open, high, low, last trade, volume, and previous close. Bid and Ask are also acquired if available. The Investor/RT data column "Feed Time" is updated with the time of the last trade price provided by Yahoo!  The Previous Close is also updated thereby updating the Change and %Change data columns

A current quotes download always updates the current daily bar (charts, quotepages, etc), and gives the user a quick method of downloading the last daily bar, either during or after the session.

To download these values for any list/quotepage of symbols, click on the "Download" button in the main toolbar to open the Download Data window. Select the Source: "Yahoo! Finance" and the Type: "Current Quotes". Also choose the "All Instruments in Quotepage" option on the left, and select the quotepage for which you would like to download current quotes. Now click the "Download" button. It will take 2-3 seconds per symbol.

Downloading of current quotes from Yahoo! can be scheduled using the "Download Data" action in Setup: Schedules. Choose "Yahoo! Finance Current Quotes" as the data server selection.  The schedule can also be assigned to a shortcut key so the user may initiate a current quotes update quickly from the keyboard at any time.

Fundamental Data
Click on the "Download" button in the main toolbar to open the Download Data window.  Select the Source: "Yahoo! Finance" and the Type: "Fundamental Data".  Also choose the "All Instruments in Quotepage" option on the left, and select the quotepage for which you would like to download fundamental data.  Now click the "Download" button.  It will take 2-3 seconds per symbol.

The following quotepage 20 columns: one for ticker and one for each of the 19 fundamental values that are imported from Yahoo! Finance.  Right-click here and choose "Save Target/Link As" and save the text file ("Yahoo! Fundamentals.txt") to your computer.  Then, from inside Investor/RT, choose "File: Import: Quotepage" and then select the file you just saved.   A quotepage of the DJI 30 should result with the columns mentioned above.  You may then save that quotepage format by right-clicking on any column heading and choosing "Save Format" and then providing a name for this format.  You can then apply this format to any other quotepage by right-clicking in any column heading of that quotepage and choosing "Change Format" and then selecting the format you just saved.

Below is a list of the fundamental values / key statistics that are imported from Yahoo! Finance.  On the left you'll find the term Yahoo! Finance uses to refer to the value, and on the right, the term used in Investor/RT (Quotepage Columns).

Industry and Sector
Sector and Industry names for stocks can be downloaded from Yahoo! Finance using the Data Download window. You can request the download for individual stocks, or for all symbols in any quotepage. Each request for sector and industry for a particular stock requires a connection to Yahoo!, there is no "bulk request" for this information. IRT will skip any stocks in the subject quotepage that already have both sector and industry name already to avoid unnecessary redundant downloading. If you have hundreds of stocks setup in IRT and you add a few new ones from time to time you can simply request industry and sector for your .Stocks quotepage again and IRT will quickly update just those new stocks that do not yet have this information. You can of course show Sector and Industry as columns in your quotepage. IRT Professional users can run scans to list stocks in certain sectors, e.g. the scan:

SECTOR = "Technology" AND CL > CL.1;

lists technology stocks that were up today. If you wish to clear out any current information you have for sector and industry you can easily do so by running the following scan on the .Stocks quotepage:

SET(SECTOR, CLEAR);

Then perform the Yahoo! Sector and Industry download for the .Stocks page to update all stocks you are tracking with IRT. Allow approximately 3 seconds times the number of stocks in .Stocks for this to complete.