AmiBroker Documentation Item No. ab304.html

This is the part of AmiBroker documentation. Copyright ©2000 Tomasz Janeczko. All rights reserved.
THIS DOCUMENT IS OUTDATED. REFER TO AMIBROKER USER'S GUIDE FOR MORE UP TO DATE INFORMATION

HOWTO: Download and import quotes using AmiQuote and AmiBroker

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to explain how to use AmiQuote and AmiBroker in order to obtain quotes from Yahoo finance sites. AmiQuote is a companion program to AmiBroker stock charting/analysis software. The main purpose of AmiQuote is to simplify and automate downloading daily and historical quotation data from free Yahoo! Finance sites (USA, UK, France, Italy, Germany and Australia).

Requirements

You will need AmiBroker version 3.30 or higher and AmiQuote 1.1 installed.

Preparing ticker list

A ticker list is a simple text file which lists line by line the tickers you want to import. The AmiQuote ticker list file has .TLS extension. AmiQuote comes with pre-written ticker list for components of main NYSE and NASDAQ indices and a number of European indices/markets. You can use those pre-written ticker lists or you can customize them or write your own one. In order to edit existing .TLS file or write completely new one all you need is plain text editor such as Notepad or any other plain ASCII editor (not MS Word!). All you have to do is to write tickers you want to import line by line (single ticker in single line) and save the file. Please make sure that you are saving the file with .TLS extension. Otherwise AmiQuote will not load this file.

Downloading data

In order to download the data please launch AmiQuote. Then please click on "Open" button in the toolbar (or choose File->Open menu) as shown in picture on the right. From the file dialog please choose one .TLS file (for example DIJA.TLS) and click Open button. The you will see the main screen of AmiQuote filled with the list of tickers loaded, as show in picture below.

Now you should switch country combo box to correct one Note that Yahoo uses suffix encoding so all tickers without suffixes are US-stocks. On the other hand if you have tickers with, for example, .L suffix it means that tickers are from London Stock Exchange. (This combo may eventually disappear in the next version of AmiQuote).

If you have US stocks in the list you can choose to download current (daily) quotes or historical quotes. When you choose to download historical quotes you will be able to define date range to use as shown below.

After choosing correct options please click on green arrow (or use File -> Start Download menu). The download process will begin. AmiQuote will display progress messages and status information including number of completed downloads and number of files left. At anytime you can stop download process with "Stop" button (red box). After finishing the download you should import the quotes into AmiBroker.

Importing quotes into AmiBroker

First, please launch AmiBroker. From the File menu please select Import From ASCII option. You will see the following file dialog:

In this picture I marked the most important items for easy identification. Marked with red is type selector combo-box ("Files of type"). In order to import AmiQuote files (those with .AQH and .AQD extensions you should choose AmiQuote Historical or AmiQuote Daily from the combo box (red arrow shows those options).

After choosing right type you will see only .AQH or .AQD files in the file list (blue arrow shows that). Now you can select one or more files from the list. Multiple selection is possible by holding CTRL key depressed while selecting the items with a mouse (you can also press SHIFT for choosing a range of files with a single click). Now when you are done choosing the files you want to import just click "Open" button. The import process will start and you will see progress bar showing the AmiBroker is importing the data. After finishing the import AmiBroker will automatically refresh stock list and you will see updated tickers and charts. If anything goes wrong with the import process AmiBroker writes a log file called "import.log" and located in AmiBroker's main directory. You can watch this log file if you want to find out what went wrong (since import.log is simple text file you can open it with any text editor)

Further information

For further information please consult AmiBroker User's Guide section "Data management - Importing data from ASCII file". In case of any further questions, comments and suggestions please contact me at: support@amibroker.com

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