Excel Stock charting

[enigmatic]

I'm rather new to stock trading and have only been trading since the downward spirl of the ASX from its peak of 6800. (perfect time to get my feet wet)

well over that time i have had a few attempts at setting myself up some sort of excel spreadsheet that will track my stocks and enable me to start looking at creating my own trading system.
all three attempts have initial started well each one better setup then the previous including more functionality and more useful information however the problem soon becomes apparent that keeping the data up to date on a constant basis, whether this is EOD data or Intra day(20mins delayed) is quiet time consuming.

So here is to my first question does anyone know of a easy source of firstly EOD data. and possibly Free Intraday data.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Trembling Hand]

http://www.float.com.au/scgi-bin/prod/dl.cgi

But I never understand why people go about re-inventing the wheel when all they end up with is a wagon wheel while everyone else is riding on pneumatic tyres.

If you want something cheap try Fcharts or incredible charts

 

[white_goodman]

http://www.float.com.au/scgi-bin/prod/dl.cgi

But I never understand why people go about re-inventing the wheel when all they end up with is a wagon wheel while everyone else is riding on pneumatic tyres.

If you want something cheap try Fcharts or incredible charts

yeh but how good were wagon wheels back in the day...however they were no curly wurlies or kinder suprises...

 

[enigmatic]

I don't think re-inventing the wheel has anything to do with it.
I have already looked at Fcharts before and although it does do alot of the things i want, It doesn't do it all so for now while learning my TA skills I thought i may aswell set up a excel document that shows me everything i need. I will at the same time use Fcharts at the same time so that i don't rely heavily on my Spreadsheets.

Back to the data i have Gone with http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com for now it seems to work however is quiet delayed. for EOD data.
Right now it is pretty simple put in the ASX code and it gets the data for that stock from the year 2003.
Will be adding in Alerting soon, which will allow me to monitor the stocks and give me alarms when a stock reaches a static price (Stop loss), then later dynamic (Trailing Loss).

And thanks for the input Trembling Hand i will look at incredible charts
although i dont think it will actual do what i want it too either.

 

[Trembling Hand]

Exactly what do you want it to do?

I'm pretty sure Fcharts set-up with prices as an Access Database will knock the socks off a flat excel spreadsheet with just one ticker of data in it.

 

[johenmo]

Incredible charts is good for charting.

Go to the library and get a copy of Kinsky's "Online Investing". Has a chapter with lots of sites and a brief description of each.

 

[enigmatic]

Might have to do it to a straight Access database maybe.

first question Trembling hand can you easily test Stop losses and trailing losses in F-Charts. This isnt just going to be a charting spreadsheet but thats what im starting with

 

[Trembling Hand]

enigmatic Have a look at Amibroker or other good software to do back testing. You will be wasting MASSIVE amounts of time having to manipulate and query data every time you want to run a test.

Excel is just rubbish for stock traders. What are you going to do, have a datasheet for every stock in the ASX? Or a separate query to suck data out of Access?

This is what I'm talking about re-inventing the wheel to end up with what 99.9% of traders gave up 100 years ago.

 

[Trembling Hand]

I use Excel for back test of sorts but I'm an Index trader. I only trade 1 or 2 things. With stocks there is too many to use something as clunky as excel.

 

[markosx]

Rather than Excel, you may whish to try google spreadsheets. You can now get live ASX price data in google spreadsheets via the "googlefinance" functions. The historic data seems to go back a few years so it might be useful.
You will also be able to set the formulas to stay up to date each time you open it the spreadsheet. I think the data is delayed by 20 mins.

For more info visit
http://documents.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=54198
or for an overview try
http://www.tvmcalcs.com/blog/comments/google_spreadsheets_and_google_finance/