I need to know where and how I can get historical open, close, high,
and low stock prices back at least several months, preferably over one
year.  I would like to have this data in some form of a flat file,
i.e. .txt, .csv etc.  Most of the companies I am interested in trade
on the NASDAQ, stocks of most interest are BRCM and WEBM.  I would
also like to know which companies have highly volatile stock prices
but still maintain reasonable trading volumns (>250,000).  I would
prefer to obtain this information free of charge.

Hello, and thanks for your question.

There are now a number of sites where you can download basic
historical quote information for individual stocks for free.  The two
that I use most often are at MSN and Yahoo!:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/
http://finance.yahoo.com/

To take Broadcom as an example, here is the current year's quotes from
Yahoo:

http://table.finance.yahoo.com/d?a=1&b=1&c=02&d=8&e=26&f=02&g=d&s=brcm

By clicking on the link below the table, you can get the data right
into Excel.

On MSN, you can do some more advanced analysis without having to
download a lot of data, by setting up stock screens with reasonably
complicated criteria.  There are a number of predefined screens here:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/finder/predefstocks.aspx

You can, of course, create customized screens as well.

I hope this answers your question.

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Request for Answer Clarification by math_man-ga on 26 Aug 2002 13:00 PDT

Tomo,

Thanks for the info. so far, Yahoo's site is just what I was looking
for.  However, I still would like to know how I can determine which
stocks are the most volatile without looking at past data for
individual companies.  That would be too time consuming.

Thanks

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Clarification of Answer by tomo-ga on 26 Aug 2002 15:24 PDT

Hello math_man,

It was for the volatility that I pointed you at MSN and the stock
screens they have.  What you need to do is create a custom stock
screen from:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/finder/customstocks.asp

Based on your info, you would set one criteria to be a high beta value
(a measure of the volatility relative to the S&P), another with
average daily volume greater than 250,000, and (say) membership on the
NASDAQ.  Of course, you can create any combination of criteria you
desire.  Running just those three right now gets me the following top
five stocks: SITE, PALM, BRCD, JDSU, and SUNW.  The full result set
can be exported to Excel.

I hope this helps clarify my answer.

Keep in mind that Yahoo! historical quotes are manipulated to take
dividend reinvestment into account.  I do not know the exact formula
they use to accomplish this (but I wish I did).  It does not appear to
be as straightforward as one would assume it to be.