How to Find Historical Stock Quotes and Dividends
Sometimes you need to know what a particular stock (or the stock market, or a stock index) was doing way back when. Perhaps you need stock purchase prices for tax purposes. Or you need to plug in the Dow Jones Index from 1945 for your economic research paper. What dividend was IBM paying in 1990? What was the high, low, open and closing price of Google's IPO? Or maybe you just want to be amazed, yet again, at how quickly and dramatically some stocks boom (Microsoft) or bust (GM) or do both (Apple). Here's how to travel back in time to see opening and closing quotes for the stock or stock index of your choosing.
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Instructions
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**Get the Symbol**
It's just easier pulling out financial information when you're working with a stocks (or index' s) symbol, rather than its name. There are many places on the web to search on a company name and get its stock trading symbol. A simple Google search usually does the trick, though I tend to use the symbol lookup at Yahoo Finance ( finance.yahoo.com ).
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**Get the History**
Yahoo Finance is also a great resource for finding a stock' s history. Just select 'Historical Prices' from the menu options on the left hand side of the page. Then, it's a simple matter to fill in the dates for the range you are interested in.
After selecting your dates, you can also select to get data on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or to access only information on dividends paid.
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**Fire Up the Spreadsheet**
At the bottom of your historical stock prices page, you'll see an option to "Download to Spreadsheet". Click this for a convenient way to capture all the data in one fell swoop (whatever that means!), and have it handy for a leisurely review or analysis.
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