Historic Share Price Information

[ADrunkenMarcus]

I hope this is the right forum - apologies if not!

I unitised my SIPP from April 2014 and this will serve as my main focus for tracking performance. However, I have been working on the historic data and managed to unitise it back to December 2007.

What I am stuck with is the portfolio value as at
21 January 2002,
8 July 2002,
23 September 2002,
17 March 2006 and
22 May 2006.

There were not many holdings and as such it should be fairly simple to get the historic share prices and multiply them by the number of shares held, which I have got records of. Sites such as Yahoo used to have downloadable share prices going back to c. 1988 for many shares, however recent changes seem to have limited this data to the last few years which is not helpful.

I am therefore searching for another data source - does anyone know a website with this, or have the following from their own records?

The shares (investment trusts) are:
Alliance Trust (ASTS);
Foreign & Colonial Growth (FGI) up to 2002 and
then there was a merger with Foreign & Colonial Capital and Income in May 2005 at 0.75881 shares for 1 (now FCI) for the 2006 valuations;
Temple Bar (TMPL)

It might be possible to seek out historic newspapers for these dates with share prices, but I am not sure investment trusts will necessarily be listed.

I do have approximate figures from the quarterly valuation statements, so I could do it roughly if the information is unobtainable!

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Best wishes


Mark.

[JohnnyCyclops]

I hope this is the right forum - apologies if not!

Not quite, but if we're quick and not too many people add to the thread we might just get away with it!

There were not many holdings and as such it should be fairly simple to get the historic share prices and multiply them by the number of shares held, which I have got records of. Sites such as Yahoo used to have downloadable share prices going back to c. 1988 for many shares, however recent changes seem to have limited this data to the last few years which is not helpful.

I am therefore searching for another data source - does anyone know a website with this, or have the following from their own records?

I was on Yahoo Finance UK a little earlier today looking up historic Unilever prices and was able to go back to 1988. It could be the path/process you previously followed has changed. The site looked a little different from the last time I checked prices there, many months ago.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/

Isn't Alliance Trust ticker ATST, not ASTS as below? Is that part of the problem?

For me on Yahoo I see 1/3rd down the screen a row of blue links. Second from the right "Historical Data". From there you can select time periods, prices or dividends, and frequency. Under time periods, select "Max". For ATST Yahoo's offering me daily prices back to 1969. There's a download button too, to dump into a spreadsheet, rather than scrolling on the browser view. Not sure if it's ATST you needed. I didn't check the other ITs you were after.

JC

[ADrunkenMarcus]

Thanks JC!

I was searching under the correct ticker for Alliance Trust, but I typed it incorrectly here. Apologies for the confusion.

For me on Yahoo I see 1/3rd down the screen a row of blue links. Second from the right "Historical Data". From there you can select time periods, prices or dividends, and frequency. Under time periods, select "Max". For ATST Yahoo's offering me daily prices back to 1969. There's a download button too, to dump into a spreadsheet, rather than scrolling on the browser view. Not sure if it's ATST you needed. I didn't check the other ITs you were after.

Many thanks and I have now obtained ATST and TMPL for all the dates that I needed. FCI is somewhat odd, as I select 'maximum' and it only goes back to September 2015. I tried to enter the dates back to either 2002 or 2006 manually, but got an error message as follows: "'Start' date must be prior to 'End' date." Quite odd in that these dates were prior to the end date!

It occurred to me that the FT online charts might work. Sure enough, I went back to 2002 and set it a day apart, so I got a single chart for each day I needed which had the opening prices:
https://markets.ft.com/data/investment- ... ?s=FCI:LSE

Prior to 2005, I will just have to assume the FGI share price based on the conversion ratio from 2005 into FCI. I know this is not exact, but then this historic data is to give me an approximate idea.

Having done this, it now looks like the accumulation unit value rose from £1 as at 3 December 2001 to £3.37 as of the last valuation in January 2017, or a compound annual growth rate of about 7.9% in total return. That seems somewhat higher than I had estimated, however it would have been 5.3% if I had taken it up to April 2016: the portfolio has gained about 53% from 5 April 2016 to date. I don't think December 2001 was an ideal time to start.

The FTSE All Share TR seems to have a 6.2% CAGR in total return, so 7.9% is not too bad.

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

Best wishes

Mark.

[tjh290633]

For FCI, have a look at http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/st ... style=1013

That takes you back to 1994.If you click on "Interactive Charts", you can move the cursor along the graph to the date that you want, the bars are at quarterly intervals, but you can change the frequency to "Daily" if you need.

TJH

[Itsallaguess]

For FCI, have a look at http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/st ... style=1013

That takes you back to 1994.If you click on "Interactive Charts", you can move the cursor along the graph to the date that you want, the bars are at quarterly intervals, but you can change the frequency to "Daily" if you need.

TJH

Google Finance will also allow some 'browsing for prices' functionality with it's graphs, in a similar way.

Here's the 10-year graph for FCI,

http://tinyurl.com/gszz6p8

If you hover your mouse over the 2006 chart-area, you'll see that some useful price and date information is given in the top-left area of the graph section.

Hopefully this can be useful, even if it's to help you verify some information you may have sourced from elsewhere.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[mike]

It's not obvious until you try to do it, but you can zoom in on 2006 to get weekly prices.

Put your cursor just above one of the arrows at the bottom right and left of the chart, and a || symbol on a slider appears. Drag this to the beginning/end of the date period you want, and do the same with the slider at the other end. You can now see the detailed prices (weekly/daily according to the time period selected) as itsallaguess described above.

Mike

[Itsallaguess]

It's not obvious until you try to do it, but you can zoom in on 2006 to get weekly prices.

Put your cursor just above one of the arrows at the bottom right and left of the chart, and a || symbol on a slider appears. Drag this to the beginning/end of the date period you want, and do the same with the slider at the other end. You can now see the detailed weekly prices as itsallaguess described above.

Mike

I'd not noticed that great feature before Mike, so thanks for that.

There's also a helpful 'Link to this view' facility on the Google Finance charts pages, so when things like this have been modified locally, we're able to share the modifications with others, so here's a link to a 'zoomed-in-on-2006' chart for FCI -

http://tinyurl.com/glkuwr5

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[ADrunkenMarcus]

Thanks TJH and Itsallaguess.

Yes, all sources are valuable and thanks for highlighting these for me because they have been worthwhile in helping me make some further checks. Something as simple as a share split or consolidation can throw off historic charts and I remember there have been issues with Yahoo's historic data and the way that they account for dividends.

I am reasonably pleased with the results. I am pretty confident in the data and what I have done is create a spreadsheet tab tracking back to 2001: after April 2014, it 'mirrors' the 2014-present unit data in my main units tab, and I have adjusted the 2001 starting unit value to a fairly random looking 0.54627 so that the unit value matches the 2014-present unit values (starting at £1 in April 2014).

While my 7.9% CAGR (net of fees) beats the FTSE All Share's 6.2% CAGR on a total return basis, performance appears to have been improving as time went on. In the earlier years, the transition from a child SIPP to a 'normal' one resulted in a fees increase at a time when the portfolio was quite small. For a period, these detracted quite significantly. Now, however, with a flat fee and a larger portfolio the fees as a proportion of the portfolio value are diminishing steadily.

Best wishes


Mark.

[ADrunkenMarcus]

I played with some more figures for December 2001 to January 2017.

My SIPP: 7.9% CAGR;
FTSE All Share: 6.2% CAGR (TR);
FTSE 100: 5.7% CAGR (TR);
Retail Price Inflation: 2.7% CAGR (since Q4 2001).

So the SIPP's 'real return' was 5.2% CAGR above inflation; 2.2% above the FTSE 100; and 1.7% above the FTSE All Share. I assume it may have lagged the FTSE 250 somewhat, but that's a guess.

Even with relatively low inflation, this lopped off more than a third off the returns. And a closet tracker fund with too many holdings costing 1.5% a year would have eaten up almost one-fifth of them, too. It's not difficult to see how inflation plus fund fees on a poorly performing collective could have swallowed over half the returns.

Best wishes


Mark.