Canadian Historical Trading Prices – an Update

In my post from January 20th called “The Elusive Search for Historical Canadian Stock Trading Prices” I mentioned that I didn’t know if the trading data included on Lexis Nexis would be included in a subscriber’s flat rate or not. Helen Katz kindly spoke with Lexis Nexis and found out that, if you speak with them before the end of February (i.e. this month) you should be able to include it in your flat rate.

I wanted to confirm this directly with Lexis Nexis Canada . I spoke with Christine Burchert, Sales Manager for Ontario. This is what she told me:

For users that are migrating from Factiva to Lexis.com we are bundling the historical quotes in with their Factiva rate. We’re essentially “grandfathering” those firms because they were used to having the content on Factiva. Lexis had to licence the quotes directly from Sungard though, so going forward they will not be part of our Factiva menu.

There you have it! If you are migrating over to Factiva, make sure you have this included!

Some additional news:

GSI Online, purchased by Thomson back in July 2005, is beefing up its offerings on LIVEDGAR. The Account Executive for Eastern Canada visited us yesterday and told us about the new historical quotes service on LIVEDGAR. This is terrific news, since Thomson was missing many of these services for transactional practices in the past. Here are some of the details:

– quotes from Canadian and U.S. exchanges
– data goes back 5 years (do you ever need anything older? We don’t usually)
– fields of data: date, open price, high, low, closing, and volume
– we are now sometimes asked for “number of trades” and I do not see that included
– data opens up in an Excel spreadsheet; I was able to easily copy and paste it over into my office version of Excel
– I did not see the ability to pull up summaries of weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly data (Canada Stockwatch doesn’t offer this either).

Overall, unless you are wanting older data or other pieces of data than those offered, this looks to be a good resource. I pulled up data from Canada Stockwatch for one company familiar to me and compared it to GSI. They were identical, except one was in chronological order and the other was in reverse chronological order. That can easily be changed with Excel if it bugs you.

I don’t have details about pricing. Presumably if you have a flat rate with GSI this will be included; please inquire with them about transactional pricing.