Historical Stock Prices

Historical Stock Prices refers to the open, high, low, close, and volume details of stocks. This information is used in technical analysis software programs to understand, and predict the behaviour of stocks in the future.

This information is available for free from yahoo finance. However, the files downloaded need to be manually amended before they can be imported into the software.

Most programs accept historical stock data in metastock format:

Symbol, Date (yyyymmdd), Open, High, Low, Close, Volume

yyyy = year. mm = month. dd = day

The files from yahoo are in the form:

Date (yyyy-mm-dd),Open,High,Low,Close,Volume,Adj Close

Downloading the historical stock data from yahoo manually is tedious, and can take a long time. There's a spreadsheet that will download the data for you automatically, and put it into metastock format: historical stock prices