Stock Historical Data - Yahoo Finance CSV

[David T.]

David, 

I agree with your ideas, and wish also that I could programmatically manage price history data—in precisely the ways you describe. However, there are many devils in the details. Take, for example, the question of which stocks to gather prices: how would a program figure out when to start or stop retrieving prices? Presumably, one only wants price data for the time period you held a given stock. As a portfolio ages, this gets more and more problematic. And that’s just one problem.

I will note that Finance::Quote does not have a date element—meaning that it only retrieves current information. A search of their discussion forum yields a *second* perl module, Finance::QuoteHist, which is set up to gather daily prices from a selected start date until today. It is unclear to my nonprogrammer eyes whether it would be easier to push F::Quote to add historical retrieval or GnuCash to add a new dependency on F::QuoteHist—but I imagine that neither will be imminent.

Moshe,
I agree also with your assessment. Personally, the challenges were too great to implement either perl or python solutions. For example, just getting GnuCash on the Mac to include python would require my compiling from source, which is something that is generally beyond me.

Ultimately, I decided that knowing what my portfolio was worth at some arbitrary point in the past was not as important as I originally thought it would be—at least, not relative to the amount of time and pain I would have to invest to retrieve that data.

Cheers,
David T.


> On Oct 28, 2016, at 6:33 AM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As another user, I think that cluttering up the data files with a lot of history that should eventually be purged is counter productive in the long term.
> 
> It would be nice if there was a  sophisticated function to remove historical prices based on some selection criteria such as before some chosen date, prices labeled as from certain sources, keep last price of each week/month/quarter/accounting period, only for selected commodities, etc.  I imagine users would usually want to keep prices associated to purchase or sale transactions, but those are initially embedded in each transaction and copied by GnuCash to the price tables mainly for convenience in report building, I think.
> 
> A companion feature might be to allow reports go to an Internet provider such as Yahoo, Google, or other for historical closing prices for that report.  GnuCash would still need to keep prices that are manually entered and/or are not published in newspapers or on the Internet.
> 
> All of those ideas are for the future if enough users want them.  I would prioritize all of them somewhere far below such things as having an underlying fully functional relational database structure, however.
> 
> David C
> 
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 6:21 PM, Milton Stern <drmoshe5 at gmail.com <mailto:drmoshe5 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Thank you David and Mr. Ralls,
> 
> David, the info was helpful. However, I noted "Some knowledge of perl and
> python is required.".
> If I was still in my programming days and I had time to test it on a test
> platform, I might consider giving it a try.
> 
> But given my current restraints, I guess I will have to go without (ie Mr.
> Ralls, for the common user you are right.)
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> Moshe
> 
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> On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 10:34 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com <mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Moshe,
> >
> > The question of importing historical stock price data has come up many
> > times over the years. In short, there is no direct way of achieving this.
> >
> > There is a page on the wiki giving one method (https://wiki.gnucash.org/ <https://wiki.gnucash.org/>
> > wiki/Stocks/get_prices).
> >
> > Another approach is to convert the csv into OFX and import that (
> > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Importing_fund_or_stock_ <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Importing_fund_or_stock_>
> > prices_from_an_OFX_file).
> >
> > Most recently as last November, someone asked this question at:
> > http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2015-November/062729.html <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2015-November/062729.html>.
> >
> > See if any of these gives you help in finding a solution.
> >
> > David
> >
> > On Oct 27, 2016, at 9:46 AM, Milton Stern <drmoshe5 at gmail.com <mailto:drmoshe5 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Everybody,
> >
> > I noticed that Yahoo Finance has a bulk Stock Historical Data export
> > function as a CSV file.
> >
> > Does anybody know if this file can be imported into GnuCash?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Moshe
> >
> > ¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø
> > He [Hillel] used to say: If I am not for myself, who is for me?
> > And if I am only for myself, what am I?
> > If not now when? (Avot 1:14)
> > ¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø
> >
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