Help importing historical stock prices

[Jim Vincent]

OK - I will try the Google sheet. 
Thanks
Jim Vincent

-----Original Message-----
From: David T. [mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 8:47 AM
To: Jim Vincent <jimvincent2 at comcast.net>
Cc: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Help importing historical stock prices

The wiki page includes the necessary scripts to gather and insert historical prices into a GnuCash file. I believe that you will need to have compiled GnuCash with python enabled, which will depend on the operating system you use.

However, before you go down that rabbit hole, perhaps you want to consider other means? GnuCash is designed firstly as an accounting app, and thus its focus is on actual transactions (as opposed to important, but not real, valuations). In other words, GnuCash works very well to document the value at which you purchased your stocks, and the value at which you sell them, but its toolset is not as useful for tracking valuation of holdings over multiple time periods. You might be trying to use a hammer to put in a screw.

If the reason you are trying to get these historical values is to establish the past value of your portfolio, it might be easier to use a spreadsheet to do this. I know that you can set up a Google Sheet with embedded functions that will quickly and easliy retrieve stock prices—without python or perl scripts. An hour or two (or three) experimenting in that might give you what you need more quickly.

David

> On Jun 7, 2016, at 8:26 AM, Jim Vincent <jimvincent2 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> There is finance-quote script. I was hoping that I could use that to get the prices and get them into gnu-cash. The amount of data is not a big concern – although there are a lot of stocks (maybe a hundred), I just need year-end data for the past six years, plus data for a starting point. I need the list of stocks to input to finance-quote, along with a list of the dates I need data for. 
> 
> I am willing to pay if someone can help me.
> 
> Jim Vincent
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com [mailto:david.carlson.417 at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 7:29 AM
> To: jimvincent2 at comcast.net; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Help importing historical stock prices
> 
> 
> 
> Jim
> 
> There is no easy way to do that.  If someone has written a script to do that perhaps they can tell us about it.
> 
> Adding a lot of price history to the data would just make the file huge anyway.
> 
> 
> 
> I sometimes add a few prices manually if I want them for a certain report.  
> 
> 
> 
> David C
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my LG G Pad 7.0 LTE, an AT&T 4G LTE tablet
> 
> 
> 
> ------ Original message------
> 
> From: Jim Vincent
> 
> Date: Mon, Jun 6, 2016 8:46 PM
> 
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org> ;
> 
> Subject:Help importing historical stock prices
> 
> 
> 
> I need help importing historical stock prices.Jim Vincent_______________________________________________gnucash-user mailing listgnucash-user at gnucash.orghtt <mailto:%20listgnucash-user at gnucash.orghtt> ps://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user-----Please <http://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user-----Please>  remember to CC this list on all your replies.You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
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