Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Old company, young data providers

I regularly get conflicting information when cross-checking stock information. This is because many data sources do not carry the stock's entire price history and it is a problem because a stock appears to be making an all-time high when it isn't.  Glentel Inc (GLN.TO) provides an example. According to the company's website, "Glentel has been publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since June 1, 1983". According to most data sources, however, it appears GLN.TO has only been trading since the late-1990's. Here are four charts to illustrate -- note that Google, Yahoo Finance, and FreeStockCharts show GLN back to 1996-99, whereas BigCharts goes back to 1983. This stock has beein an uptrend for several years regardless of which data source you consult. But, it is not at an all-time high price.






Below is the only free online stock chart I found with the full dataset. Kudos to BigCharts.


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