IMPORTING WITH THE DATA WIZARD

FDC has created seamless downloading of data from both free and paid sources.

You have the choice of going to the data wizard or by requesting data in a command line. The wizard method is excellent for single downloads, whereas the command line method is our preferred choice to automate data collection and updating. The data wizard is activated by clicking the following icon on any command window:

We viewed this wizard earlier when we were learning how to view data.

Free data is everywhere. For example, Yahoo is kind enough to provide free end-of-day data on thousands of stocks, with a time-delay from CSI, one of the largest data suppliers. FDC has a seamless function for accessing this data over the web instantaneously. So if your use of FDC is to do research on past stock prices, there’s no need to buy data. If you do not know the symbol of the stock that you need, pay your friends at http://finance.yahoo.com/l a visit to get the symbol.

To retrieve the free data from Yahoo Finance, either select the Yahoo button in the data menu or simply enter 'YAHOO' GETDATA 'symbol' [beginning date] [ending date]. Note that quotation marks (single or double) are essential, and the dates must be in the YYYYMMDD format. For example a request for Wal-Mart Stores will be: 'YAHOO' GETDATA 'WMT' 20020202 20020830 MOVAVE BONDS. You will instantaneously be rewarded with the requested dataset, conveniently converted into FDC format. Should you request more data than Yahoo Finance normally delivers, FDC will continue to go back to Yahoo Finance until it fulfils your request, telling you in dialog boxes of its progress.

Should you want to get access to data as soon as possible after the markets close, or use futures, options or bond data, you will probably want to use a commercial data vendor. Of the various data vendors we have tried, we like the folks at www.primate.com a lot, because they are both good and extremely reasonable. In fact, we ourselves (in our trading capacity) subscribe to Primate, which has over 100,000 data series from all over the world. FDC has a seamless function to access that data also. Just use either the Primate button in the data menu or type: “primate” dataget “wmt” 20020101 20020830 .

We have also provided similar access to the database of the Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis, which at last count had 880 data series. We have provided for quick retrieval of 7 daily Treasury interest rate series and 5 daily foreign exchange series, but you can easily retrieve any of their series if you know the series ID. They can be learned at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ , and then retrieved by “fed” get “dgs10” 20020101 20020830 . Note that the Fed’s data (because of its delay) is more useful for research than for trading.

EXPORTING DATA

Each displayed dataset has a "SaveAs" menu. This not only allows you to save FDC data with a different name, it allows automatic conversion to Ascii as well.

USING THE CONVERSION utility

Any command window has an Import-Export icon as shown below

When clicked, it brings up the following screen:

Here you may choose to convert any ASCII Datasets to FDC format, and any Datasets from Technical Tools.  We will be adding other data suppliers as time goes by.  You can also export any FDC Dataset to ASCII format in a number of ways.  Since most data suppliers have methods of converting to ASCII, this gives a method of importing their data in two steps.

Remember though, any data can be pasted from a spreadsheet or word processing program, or copied and pasted to one of these programs.