Hi All, Well I can certainly see that the getdata addin is a nice idea given its ease of use and different types of data that it can provide. But then again I note that there have been no new posts to this topic since March 2018......?
My personal experience with using data obtained automatically from various web sources can be summarised as follows:-
a) Data quality is really important. Any source probably can’t ever be 100% correct, but if it cant be relied on to be sort of 95% accurate then using it all may not a good idea. Garbage in garbage out as they say. And some of yahoos data items seem to be questionable particularly for UK stocks given some of the posts made here.
b) I think that you need to have a mechanism built into your spreadsheet that enables you to manually capture any data items that might be missing (or which you can see are wrong) and allow you to temporarily override them with a correct value. Hopefully you will only need to use this mechanism in a small number of cases but not having such a mechanism will likely be a problem. Though this is an issue for the getdata user rather than the addin itself.
c) Time delays inherent in the data can also be an issue (though perhaps not for HYPers who may only update their spreadsheets infrequently ?). Personally I much prefer using a source that provides real-time prices when the market is open. Or at worst is subject to a 15 minute delay. Some sources only provide end of day values, this might be OK for some people – but I would not want to go with that option. Confess I’m not sure what the Yahoo API does in this respect.
d) You need a pricing source that can provide data for ideally all of the investments that you hold (or might hold). Having a few missing items that need to be entered manually is OK, but if you have a lot of items not covered then doing a portfolio update would be a painful and time consuming process.
e) I have personally found obtaining accurate information on upcoming dividends quite difficult for my investments. I use
http://www.dividenddata.co.uk but because I hold preference shares, investment trusts and ETFs and only a small selection of single stocks I find that this only meets a small fraction of my needs. I certainly could not rely on it to automatically populate ALL of my dividend data. Instead I manually maintain the dividend data for EVERY investment that I own or might own (about 100 investments) and display what
http://www.dividenddata.co.uk contains about these in separate fields so that I can correct my data where necessary. This may sound like a massive undertaking but it isn’t really.
Anyway the getdata addin is clearly a tool that some in the community are finding very useful, so I can only commend the work that has been done.
ATB
Pref