Figure 1.
Step 1. Configure the software*. Press the "configure" button (move your cursor over a button you will see the button's name) as shown in the following screenshot, a configuration dialog will pop up. Open a Windows Explorer to create a directory in which you want to save the historical data (e.g., F:\shantech\, you may replace F with a C if you don't have an F drive on your machine). Type in the path of the directory you created for the historical data. Select "load all" or "update" to specify the time interval of data you want to download. "update" automatically set the end date to be your today's date. The format for the date is "MM/dd/yy", e.g., "05/11/05" for May 11, 2005.
There is an "Append" checkBox* on the "Data Periodicity" row. You may check this box to append downloaded data to existing data files to save download time and traffic. For example, if you already have historical data as of yesterday, you may elect to download only "today's" data and append it to existing data files.
Click "Ok" to save the configuration and close the dialog.
Step 2. Add symbols / open a symbol list. Press the "add" button to add rows in the symbol list table. Enter the symbols of interest in the table. The symbol can either be a stock symbol or an option symbol. You can go to http://finance.yahoo.com/lto look up the stock symbol of a company. For options symbol of a company, you should click on the stock symbol and then click on "options" to get the symbol series of option chain of that company.
Step 3. Delete symbol from the symbol list. Select the row that contains the symbol and press the "delete" button to delete it.
Step 4. Save the symbol list in the table. Press "save" or "save as" button to save the symbol list you typed in the table. The symbol list will be stored with a .lst extension.
Step 5. Adjust stock splits*. Some stocks have splits. For example, AAPL has splits on June 16, 1987, June 21, 2000, February 28, 2005. Their corresponding splits are 2:1, 2:1, 2:1 respectively. In order to reflects the splits in the charts accordingly, you should select the row for the symbol and press the "Adjust splits" button to enter dates and splits information.
Figure 3 shows the dialog for entering the June 16, 1987 2:1 split of AAPL. The corresponding format for date information is 06/16/87, while 2 for "after" split and 1 for "before" split, representing 2:1. Click the "Ok" button to save the split information and close the dialog.
If the stock has more than one splits as is the case for AAPL, repeat this step until all splits information are entered and saved. Figure 2 shows all the results after entering splits information for AAPL.
Step 6. Download historical data. Press the "load" button to download
historical data of all the symbols in the table from the Internet. The data will be saved
in the directory you chose in Step 1. You can press the "configure" button to check
the directory you configured for data storage. The files have the same name as the stock
symbol, with a .prc extension (e.g., the file name for GOOG historical data is GOOG.prc)
To download the historical data of a symbol in the table, you may select the
row that contains the symbol and then press "load selected" button.
Step 7. Create a new symbol list. Press the "new" button. The symbol list in the table will be closed. Press "add" button to add symbols to the list.
Step 8. Exit Click the "Close" button on the top-right of the frame to exit the software.
*: some of the functions are available only to users of Equity Analyzer Professional version.