Daily Stock Price Record
The Daily Stock Price Record is history. That’s usually a vernacular term implying that something or somebody is no longer important but history is itself, important. There’s another saying which says something like “History repeats itself”, another says “what goes round comes round,” and yet another which talks of learning from past mistakes. It’s an unfortunate fact that very few people learn from mistakes - most people don’t even learn from their own mistakes and they certainly never learn from the mistakes of others. The daily stock price record is a catalogue of other people’s mistakes - there for the learning from! But it has more positive and beneficial uses than just being a journal of people getting things wrong. There are several circumstances in which stock prices from the past might be needed. April 15 is tax return day and along with the requests for the tax forms themselves come the requests for stock prices. Really, those prices for the current year should have been logged as they happened but very few people think to do that. At any time of the year, people settling estates can need stock prices for dates in the past. The obvious place to look for the information you need is on a web site - either that of the company in question, NYSE (Toronto SE if you’re in Canada) or NASDAQ: After all, that’s free information and it’s conveniently on your desk top either at home or in your office. If you’re searching web sites, try to have the information you’re going to want to hand - otherwise you’ll get frustrated by having to pause or you’ll forget to minimise a browser window before going to another site - then you’ll have to go back into your own history - and so it goes on. If you’ve got the name, ticker symbol and the dates you need there, it should be a simple enough job - should be! If you can't find the price you want on a Web site, you may have to resort to a printed source and that probably means a trip downtown to visit your local municipal library. Lots of librarians remember shelf after shelf of the Daily Stock Price Record, once called the ISL Daily Stock Price Index. It eprints the high, low, and closing prices of stocks traded on the major exchanges, and the NASDAQ series also contains bid and asked prices for mutual funds. Each volume contains prices for a calendar quarter, which is especially convenient if the date in question fell on a weekend or public holiday when the markets