FREE DAILY DATA

After launching Lighthouse Trader for the first time, you must create a new Lighthouse Trader database on your PC. When you do this you must choose your source of daily data.  Here are your choices.

Loading Yahoo! data

After creating a Lighthouse Trader database and choosing “Yahoo!” as your data provider, you are ready to load price/volume data. To do this, click on the “Load Data” button near the top left corner of the Lighthouse Trader application

Simply enter one or more ticker symbols for equities and indexes in the “Add Symbols” text box. Type the symbols with spaces or commas separating them. Then click the “Add Symbols” button. You may enter additional symbols at any time. Be sure to use Yahoo!’s definitions for index symbols (eg. “^DJI” is the symbol for the Dow Jones Industrial
Average, etc.)

Here are a few of the major index symbols offered by Yahoo!

Now click the “Load Data” button near the bottom right corner of the window to begin loading price/volume data for these symbols.

You will need to perform the “Load Data” process once each night, after the markets have closed and the data becomes available on Yahoo!.

Loading Eoddata data

After creating a Lighthouse Trader database and choosing “eoddata – free” as your data provider, you are ready to load price/volume data.

Lighthouse Trader creates the following directories on your PC. These are the directories where you will download the EODDATA daily price data files.

• c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\daily
• c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\historical
• c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\symbols

Note: On Linux and Mac systems, the lighthousetrader subdirectories will be beneath the USER_HOME directory.

First you must visit www.eoddata.com and register as a new member (this is free).

IMPORTANT: when registering, you must make the following selections regarding data format:

• preferred format: Metastock ASCII (7 column)
• include symbol suffix: check this box
• include header row: check this box

After registering, go to the EODDATA home page and decide which exchanges you wish to load into Lighthouse Trader. Typically you might want to load data for the AMEX, INDEX, NASDAQ, and NYSE exchanges. Actually, “INDEX” is not an exchange but a collection of indexes (eg. SP500, INDU, COMP, etc.) Most traders will want the INDEX data, in addition to one or more of the other exchanges.

Click on the download link for an exchange. This will take you to a page showing you a number of daily data files you may download to your PC for that exchange.

IMPORTANT: If this is the first time you have downloaded daily price data for an exchange, you must first download the symbol file for that exchange.
Click on the “symbol list” link near the bottom of the page for that exchange and save the symbol file in c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\symbols. You can now download daily data files by clicking on the available dates listed near the top of the page. Save these data files in the c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\daily directory.

If you wish to purchase additional historical price data files for this exchange, click on the “Buy” button for the desired historical data upgrade option. This will take you to a web site that accepts credit card payments. After you have authorized payment, you may return to the EODDATA web page for the desired exchange. You will see new links for the historical files you have just purchased. Download these historical files to the c:\lighthousetrader\data_providers\eodfree\historical directory.

Once you have downloaded the symbol files, daily files, and optional historical price files for the exchange(s) of interest to you, start the Lighthouse Trader application. If this is the first time you are running Lighthouse Trader, remember, you must create a new empty database before you do anything else in the application. This should take less than one minute. To create a new database, click on the “File.New Database” menu item and follow the instructions.

To load the downloaded data files into the Lighthouse Trader database, click on the “Load Data” button near the top left corner of the window, and then click the “Load Data Now” button in the lower right corner. The first time you load data into Lighthouse Trader, if you have several years of historical data, it may take twenty or thirty minutes to complete the load. After the initial load, each new day of data should take only a couple of minutes to load.

Industry Group data

Industry group classifications and the ticker symbols belonging to each industry group are downloaded automatically from Yahoo!™ when you first create the Lighthouse Trader database. This process takes about three minutes, if you are using a broadband internet connection. You may download the latest industry groups and associated symbols, at any time, by clicking on the “File.Acquire Industry Group Reference Data” menu item. This will update all symbols the Lighthouse Trader database with the new industry group data.

You can view the Yahoo!™ industry group classifications at http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ind_index.html

Uses Free Data > Back to start