historical stock data

How do I get historical stock data?

Investing in stocks can be risky. If you are not smart you could lose a lot of money. Even smart people lose money sometimes. Those that know what they are doing hopefully have a lot more successes than failures and make a lot of money in the stock market. In order to be successful they have to know how to read stock charts and how to analyze stocks.

There are two different ways to analyze stocks. One way is called fundamental analysis and one ways is called technical analysis. For those who use technical analysis a major part of the analyzing process is getting historical stock data. Historical stock data is not that hard to get and it can help you out a lot when analyzing stocks and deciding whether or not to invest in them. Using the historical stock data you can look at the past trends of certain companies, or the whole market, and knowing these things can help you to determine what future trends will be.

There are multiple places where historical stock data can be found. The first place where it can be found is in Google Finance. Google Finance has great graphs with a lot of information. They can give you historical stock data all the way back forty years. They can show you a chart on different companies that will show you the trends of that company over the last forty years or you can go to a small margin. You can look at the last five years, ten years or twenty years. Google finance really is a great place to look when you want to find historical stock data.

Another place to look is on the website of the company you are looking up. Some companies will have a place right on their website where you can go to find historical stock data. They have a place where you can look up to see charts of their stocks over certain periods of time. This will sometimes be found in an investor relations area or it may be located somewhere else.

If either of these two places do not interest you, you can also try out Yahoo Finance. Yahoo finance can take you back five years farther than Google can. Even five years might make a big difference depending on what you are looking for. One problem with Yahoo Finance is how their graphs are set up. Some people find that they are hard to read because they are on a logarithmic scale and so they can turn out distorted. So even though they can give you a lot of history, some people do not like to use them.

Another fabulous place to look is on the Wall Street Journal home page. Wall Street Journal can provide both quotes and research for you. They can give you from a ten day chart, all the way back to when the company first started. That is a huge amount of historical data. That is all the historical data you could possibly need. That is farther than Google or Yahoo will take you unless the company you are researching is less than forty years old.

One problem with the Wall Street Journal page though is that you have to be a subscriber. That means you have to pay for it. If you have to money to do this then that would not be a problem, but what if you did not want to spend the money? One option would be to try their free two-week access. This way you can use it for two weeks and hopefully get all the information you need. If you cannot get all the information you need in two weeks, then you will at least hopefully get a lot of valuable information. Then after that you should just go to Google or Yahoo since their historical data is very good also.