Appendix A: Data Sources
Retrieving stock quotes requires that you know the appropriate ticker symbol (i.e., abbreviation) for a company. Each of the services below allow you to look up a company’s ticker symbol by entering the company’s name. For instance, entering International Business Machine retrieves the symbol IBM.
| Yahoo-Stock quotes | quote.yahoo.com | Provides stock and some futures quotes. Be sure to check detailed quote option. Last trade price, dividends, volume available. |
| Washington Post | www.WashingtonPost.com | Provides stock, future and option quotes. Select Detailed quote. Last trade price, dividends, volume available. Historical price charts available. International quotes available. Currency exchange rates available. Nice help section on constructing Future symbols for quotation |
| Lombard Public Access | www.lombard.com | Provides stock and option quotes. Free, but registration required. Nice explanation of how to construct option symbols (these encode the expiration date and the strike price). Also, a the whole set of options associated with a stock can be retrieved. Historical and intraday graphs available. |
| Internationalist | www.internationalist.com | Information on a multitude of countries. Financial info. and links to exchanges available. |
| Wall Street Journal (WSJ) | www.wsj.com | Provides previous day’s closing prices for stocks, futures and selected options (print or electronic) Internet access is free for 2 weeks, then a subscription fee is required. You can use closing prices from the print WSJ. If you take this approach, you must decide to make the trade on a given day and then record the close or settle price when it is published the following day. In effect, you are committing to trade without knowing the price at which you will transact. |
Other useful sites
| Bloomberg Web Site | www.bloomberg.com | |
| Morgan Stanley | www.ms.com/MS.html | for MSCI World Index quotes. |
| Quote.com | www.Quote.com | |
| Barron’s | www.barrons.com |
Bloomberg Terminal (Fuqua Library)
| [equity] [go] 1 [go] | for symbol lookup |
| [symbol] [equity] DES [go] | for company description |
| [symbol] [equity] BQ [go] | for Bloomberg Quote: Price, spread, volume |
| [symbol] [equity] GP [go] | graph price for recent months |
| [symbol] [equity] GIP [go] | graph all of today’s prices |
| [symbol] [equity] DVD [go] | dividends and ex-dividend dates |
| [symbol] [equity] Q [go] | current quote |
| [symbol] [equity] OMON [go] | options series for specified equity |
| CTM [go]
1 [go] selects bonds 1 [go] for 30 yr. T-bond USZ6 for Dec ‘96 30 yr. US bond |
for commodity menu e.g., 1
select commodity type select specific contract identify contract symbol |
| [sym] [cmdty] DES [go]e.g., USU6 [cmdty] DES [go] | for contract description: delivery, notional value, tick value |
| [sym] [cmdty] TR [go] | Trade Recap. for summary of intra-day prices. |
| [symbol] [equity] Q [go] | current quote |
Hit the help key on any given screen to learn more.