Load historical stock quote data from Yahoo

[wardzynski]

Dear QV developers,

I am new to QV but I am still trying to get this to work. I have loaded current quote data using the URL string from Yahoo finance stock website.

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=AAPL&f=sl1d1d2t1c1p2ohgvjkrdej&e=.csv

The I can load all the neccessary data for APPL into QV - example uploaded below.

But now to to the hard part, I want to load historical data for several stocks.

Unfortunately you can not use a simple URL string as above for more then 1 stock at a time. But only for 1 stock at a time.

Example:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=AAPL&a=00&b=1&c=2012&d=08&e=2&f=2012&g=d&ignore=.csv

So now I am wondering how I can code it in order to load current data as well as historical data.

The current data is not to hard to load for 1 stock, the linking issue with the historical data can be based on SYMBOL = stock name, in our case: AAPL.

But how can I load the historical data for let us say 5 different stocks, not just 1. You would basically need 5 different URLs, and maybe use wildcards inside the URL in QV so you load historical data using a FOR statement and just chaning the SYMBOL in the URL for fetching the historical quote data from the server?

Appreciate your kind help!

[whiteline · Accepted solution]

You are right.

You can create inline table with parameters (StockNames for example with field StockName).

Then assign your URL to a variable (for example URLBase).

Parameterize it with 'Dollar-Sign Expansion with Parameters'  (look at help).

Then use FOR:

for i=1 to NoOfRows('StockNames')

     LET CurrentStock = FieldValue('StockName', i);

     LOAD

           CurrentStock as StockName,

     ...

     FROM

     [$(URLBase(CurrentStock))]

     (html, ...)

Next i;

[wardzynski]

Thank you for your quick help! Worked perfectly!