How to Download Stock Prices From Yahoo
When you analyze a stock as a potential investment, it helps to review its price history to see where it has been trading. Yahoo Finance provides easy access to this data for any stock on its website and allows you to download it as a comma-separated value, or CSV, file. This type of file opens in a table format in many spreadsheet and database programs. When you download a stock’s prices into this format, you can customize and arrange the data to fit your specific needs.
Visit the Yahoo Finance homepage. Click the stock quote text box and type a company‘s name or its stock‘s ticker symbol. Click “Get Quotes” to pull up its main quote page.
Step 2Click “Historical Prices” to view a table of the stock’s daily price information. This shows its daily opening and closing price as well as the highest and lowest price it reached each day. It also shows the daily volume, or number of shares traded, and the daily adjusted closing price, which factors in stock splits and dividends.
Step 3Click the drop-down arrow next to “Start Date” and select the month you want the range of prices to begin. Click the adjacent boxes and type a beginning day and year. Do the same for the end date. For example, if you want to download a stock’s price history dating back to Feb. 1, 2000, input Feb. 1, 2000 as the start date and today’s date as the end date.
Step 4Click a button next to “Daily,” “Weekly” or “Monthly” to view prices for one of those frequencies. For weekly prices, the opening price is the stock’s first price on the first trading day of the week, while the closing price occurs on the last trading day. The high and low are the highest and lowest prices reached during the week. With monthly prices, the open and close occur on the first and last trading day of the month, respectively. The high and low are the most and least someone paid for the stock each month. In this example, select daily prices.
Step 5Click “Get Prices” to view the price history for your selected date range.
Step 6Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Download to Spreadsheet.” A box pops up asking what you want to do with the file.
Step 7Click “Open with” and select a program that supports CSV files from the adjacent drop-down menu to download the stock prices directly to that application. Alternatively, click “Save File” to download the file to your hard drive. If necessary, name the file and choose a folder to save it in. Click “OK” to complete the download.
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- To open a file you downloaded to your hard drive, open your spreadsheet application or other program. Click the “File” menu and click “Open.” Click the drop-down arrow next to “File type” and select “Text Files: *.txt; *.csv." Locate the folder in which you saved the file. Click the file and click “Open.”