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Historic Prices for Defunct Stocks

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JohnnyCyclops
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Historic Prices for Defunct Stocks

#439890

Postby JohnnyCyclops » September 5th, 2021, 8:41 pm

A small practical tip. Faced with back-calculating my annual HYP value over the last four years (to work out the HYP's trailing yield and for unitisation), it required looking up share prices. Easy enough, except for a few that are no longer listed.

I stumbled across a site I'd not found before. uk.investing.com. While many other sites don't seem to list such stocks, it's possible to find them on this site (others may be available). The site's own search function was hit and miss, but Googling got me there with search terms like "Investing Greene King Share Price" which got me to this interactive chart, allowing me to read off closing prices on my HYP's year ends.

https://uk.investing.com/equities/green ... nced-chart

Gengulphus
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Re: Historic Prices for Defunct Stocks

#439944

Postby Gengulphus » September 6th, 2021, 8:16 am

Thanks! It definitely looks like a useful resource for who have retrospectively done unitisation calculations on their HYPs and found that they want accurate whole-portfolio valuations on their trade dates, but only have the historical share prices for the shares that are still on the market, those they actually traded and for dates that their brokers sent them portfolio valuation statements. It's not a complete solution, because most importantly, it's liable to be a lot of work to gather all the share prices needed (one really wants some sort of bulk-download facility, which I haven't spotted), and less importantly, also because the closing prices one can look up seem to be limited to weekly ones before the last few years (e.g. the daily chart for Greene King that you link to can only be pulled back to July 31st, 2017, but if one switches it to the weekly chart, one can go back to 1992), and there might also be limitations about which stocks it has charts for. But used judiciously, it looks to be distinctly useful for improving the accuracy of back-calculated unitisation calculations.

Such calculations are of course not actually needed to run a HYP - they're to do with monitoring how you've done in the past, not with making decisions about what to do in the present - so the resource won't by any means be of interest to all HYPers. But for those who want to do such monitoring, it provides a useful opportunity to improve the accuracy of their monitoring.

Gengulphus

Itsallaguess
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Re: Historic Prices for Defunct Stocks

#439949

Postby Itsallaguess » September 6th, 2021, 8:41 am

Gengulphus wrote:
It's not a complete solution, because most importantly, it's liable to be a lot of work to gather all the share prices needed (one really wants some sort of bulk-download facility, which I haven't spotted), and less importantly, also because the closing prices one can look up seem to be limited to weekly ones before the last few years (e.g. the daily chart for Greene King that you link to can only be pulled back to July 31st, 2017, but if one switches it to the weekly chart, one can go back to 1992), and there might also be limitations about which stocks it has charts for.


There's underlying daily price data for Greene King covering those earlier periods on a different section of the site though, so the above might only be an issue with the charted data -

Image

Source - https://uk.investing.com/equities/greene-king-historical-data

The historical data shown above is found via the initial chart link by then going to General / Historical Data, and then there's two user-generated fields for date-ranges..

The above tabular data also has a 'Download Data' option above the generated table of prices..

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Gengulphus
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Re: Historic Prices for Defunct Stocks

#440037

Postby Gengulphus » September 6th, 2021, 1:37 pm

Thanks for that as well - as you may have guessed, I failed to spot that particular link!

The site does seems to have historical prices for quite a few defunct stocks, though as JohnnyCyclops indicated, searching with Google finds quite a few of them. I haven't managed to find a particularly challenging one, though: Arriva (*), which was taken over from my HYP in August 2010. I suspect the issue might be that its EPIC "ARI" has been re-used since - a microcap called Strategic Thought Group plc renamed itself Active Risk Group plc and changed its EPIC from "STR" to "ARI" in June 2011...

Not intended as a criticism of JohnnyCyclops's tip, though! It definitely allows one to find more historical prices and so improve the accuracy of backdated unitisation, and improvement rather than perfection is probably as much as one can expect, at least without paying large fees to something like the LSE's Historical Prices Service!

(*) By the way, I haven't yet tried all the defunct stocks that have been in my HYP over the last 20ish years, or even yet compiled a list of them - I've just tried a few that sprang to mind. Arriva is among them because at one point years ago, I looked at an online portfolio tracking utility that I hadn't kept up to date and thought "how on earth did something called Active Risk get into my HYP?"! ;-)

Gengulphus


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