Of all the places online where you can get free EOD historical data, yahoo finance is the best. Why? Because it caters for many stock exchanges in the world. Many other websites may only cater for one stock exchange, mainly U.S. stocks. If you live outside the U.S, it is significantly harder to get free historical stock data. The complete list of stock exchanges supported by yahoo can be found here: yahoo finance exchanges. To date, there are about 60 stock exchanges supported on yahoo. Thats about 60 countries yahoo caters for. No other online source support for that many stock exchanges.
The amount of historical data you can download is all dependent on the age of the stock, and the data provider. Some stocks on yahoo go back over 40 years! Some stocks are younger, and have only 10 years of data. But let me emphasise again how much data there is stored on yahoo for you to download. Alot! And its all free. Anyone in the world can download the data for their technical analysis.
The only downside to all this free data, is that yahoo makes it a little hard to download their data. Just a little. There's many ways around it, like this spreadsheet I wrote to bypass their troublesome ways: historical stock data downloader.
Let me explain. Yahoo does not allow you to state your stock exchange and say 'give me all historical data for the NYSE stock market for the past 10 years'. No no, they don't want to make it that easy for you. You have to specify each stock that you want. You have to download historical data one stock at a time. Thats alot of clicks for 500+ stocks.
Another way that yahoo makes it harder for its users, is that it uses its own format. Most software programs use metastock format. Yahoo chooses not to provide their data in this format. So users will not only have to manually download each stock, but then they have to go and reformat it into metastock format. What a pain!
Lucky for you, this is easily automated. I've written an excel spreadsheet macro so users don't have to do all that clicking, and reformatting. Downloading is as easy as the click of a button. I hope you enjoy my free spreadsheet, and share it round to others looking for free EOD historical data. Enjoy!
spreadsheet >> historical stock data