

the next without changing stocks or time periods when you request data from Yahoo. It’s hard to explain in words but you’ll notice this if you backtest your trading models frequently and observe radically different stats one day vs. One of the most annoying errors is the blatant inconsistencies in the data for the same stock during the same time period. However, in my experience, Yahoo Finance has occasional errors. Matlab, GNU R, Octave, etc.) have libraries for importing Yahoo Finance historical data including this one for Excel. Yahoo Finance is perhaps the most well-known source of free daily stock market data.

I’ll only briefly go over how to import the data from these sources into Excel although some of these sources have APIs which allow you to import the data into a variety of different programming languages and statistical packages. Once you have a profitable trading strategy running, it’s recommended that you switch to paid data. However, for beginner traders just testing the waters, Finance majors in college, and buy and hold investors, free data should suffice.

Free data occasionally contains errors and often isn’t updated in a timely manner after market close. No professional trader should ever rely on FREE data for their day to day trading.
