Download Stock Histories to Excel
MSN Money and Yahoo Finance are two good resources for those that like to follow stock trends by creating their own tables or charts in Excel. To retrieve a history of the performance of a selected stock, start at the Home page for either site. Enter a stock symbol into the "Get Quotes" input box. I started with Berkshire Hathoway's Class A shares, which closed yesterday at $115,500 / share (the highest price of any U.S. stock).
After entering the symbol into MSN Money, you get a page that contains the following:
The Yahoo Finance page looks similar to the MSN Money page:
Both sites have sidebars on the left side of their pages that allow you to access historical data. In the MSN Money sidebar, look under Charts - Historical. When you click on that link you get a chart that shows the history for the time period you selected. To retrieve the chart data, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the "View price history with dividends / splits" link.
In Yahoo Finance, look under Quotes - Historical Prices. Yahoo Finance offers a greater amount of price detail for download than MSN Money does. For example, you can get historical prices by day, week, or month as well as select your own time periods. The screenshot below shows the daily level of detail that's available.
Don't worry if you can't afford the $115,500 / share Class A stock. You can always pick up a few shares of the Class B stock for approximately 1/30 of the price of the Class A shares. Yesterday the Class B shares closed at $3,850.
