[ARCHIVE: This page is no longer maintained. 90045 students should refer to the class 4 session materials (August 2018).]
www data download
Sources of stock market price data
Stock market price data is readily accessible from a number of web sites. Popular data sources include Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, and msn Money. The time span of historical data available from these sites varies considerably, from the last 12 months for msn, to more than 50 years for Yahoo.
The two sites with the greatest availability of data for download are Yahoo and Google. Both provide daily data for the Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume series. For major United States corporations, such as General Electric - Yahoo has daily data back to January 1962 and Google has data since 1970. msn, on the other hand, only has weekly data for last 12 months (sourced from Morningstar).
Both Yahoo and Google provide a download link, but Google disables the download feature when Australian data is accessed. In contrast, Yahoo does not have this restriction, and this enables the user to download the full data selection from Yahoo as a CSV file. In contrast, Google displays Australian data with a maximum of 30 rows per screen, and the user needs to copy and paste each screen of data, screen by screen. International price data, that is, price data from outside of the United States is supplied to Yahoo by Morningstar.
Other sites also provide snap shot price and other financial information. These include:
- Financial Review - markets data
- Barron's - market data center
- Bloomberg - markets
- Financial Times - markets data
- Reuters - global market data
- Wall Street Journal - market data
Finding price data on Yahoo finance
Example: To find stock price data for ANZ bank over the time span January 2010 to December 2013 - follow these steps:
- Go to the Yahoo finance Australian site at au.finance.yahoo.com
- The Yahoo code for the ANZ bank is ANZ.AX. (i) Start to type the code in the
Look Up
field. Yahoo's suggestive search feature (ii) will provide a list of search suggestions in a drop down list. SelectANZ.AX
from the list in figure 1.

Look Up
field, then (ii) select stock from drop down box- Next, click the
Historical Prices
link at (i) in figure 2

Historical Prices
link- This will display the Historical Prices screen in figure 3. (i) In the
Start Date:
field select Jan 1 2010, and (ii) Dec 31 2013 for theEnd Date:
field. Leave the radio button atDaily
for daily prices. (iii) Next clickGet Prices
button to run the filter and update the data. Note that the YahooStart Date
is earlier in time than theEnd Date
. These may differ to the date orientation used in a number of Excel function referenced in the Stock Analyser project.

Start Date
, (ii) enter the End Date
, then (iii) click the Get Prices
buttonDownloading price data from Yahoo finance
- Clicking the
Get Prices
button display the updated Historical Prices screen in figure 4. Depending on the file associations setting for your browser, clicking on theDownload to Spreadsheet
link might simply save the file as table.csv. The next download would then be table(2).csv (table.csv is renamed to table(1).csv), table(3).csv and so on. To name the csv file before saving, follow the steps in point 6.

Download to Spreadsheet
link to save the csv file- To name the csv file before saving,
right click
theDownload to Spreadsheet
link (figure 4 (i)). This will display the dialog box shown in figure 5. Now select theSave Link As
item.

right click
menu - select the Save Link As
item - The
Save Link As
item will display theEnter name of file to save as
dialog shown in figure 6. Enter theFile name: anz.ax
with the three character stock code and the two character Australian equity code, andSave as type: Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File (*.csv)
. Then click theSave
button.

File name: anz.ax
, and Save as type: Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File (*.csv)
- This example was developed in Excel 2013 Pro 64 bit
- Browser: Firefox 30.0
- Published: 2 September 2014
Revised: Friday 24th of February 2023 - 02:37 PM, Pacific Time (PT) [Last modified: