From someone who grew up in the dark ages of IBM PC’s, floppy disks, and 28k modems for online access, we have certainly come a long way; especially as it relates to access to financial data.
I recently chatted with a colleague and we discussed sources of market information. Bloomberg, of course, is the info giant for financial information; a one-stop online shop for almost everything financial with great analytics, but at a steep price! However, they don’t have a monopoly on data and analytics and a lot of what they offer can be gotten for free on respected sites. Following are a few of our favorite sources of data and analytics.
For raw data, Yahoo finance is a good first place to check. One of my favorite features to help calculate total returns for stocks, mutual funds, or ETFS is the “Historical Data, Adj Close” data. This data adjusts the price of the security for dividends paid so that a pure “total return” calculation can be done; very useful to track performance between two dates that aren’t on an even month- or quarter-end. Simply divide the ending value by the beginning value to get a total return including price and income return.
The “Chart” feature on Yahoo Finance is also very robust. It allows price charting for custom date ranges with comparison to additional securities.
For pure raw data with a focus on economics, you can not beat the FRED site sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. They have populated all the official data for all the economic statistics you could ever need into a handy online interface. Data series like official historical inflation, GDP, and industrial production, as well as financial data like credit spreads, yield rates, and S&P 500 are all there and easily accessible. In fact, it includes access to over 500,000 financial and economic data series (who knew there were that many!!)
I have a few other favorite sites that focus on analytics I will post next week.