The open, high, low and closing prices of nearly every security traded on the US stock exchanges are updated every day at Yahoo.com. This data along with each day's volume data is made available free to the general public 24 hours a day. Trend Engine's Downloader Excel Add-in is a tool you can use to retrieve this data. Downloader displays a setup form requesting the parameters that are required to download a stock's end of day prices. Filling in the Company Symbol and clicking the start and final dates on this form are all that you have to do to run Downloader. The starting date and final date set the boundaries for the time period that you want to retrieve historical data from.

After setup, Downloader immediately goes to Yahoo.com to download the historical price data that you have requested. A normal Excel spreadsheet is then created and given the same name as the company symbol you chose to download. You can use this spreadsheet to take advantage of the downloaded data using any of the Excel functions you usually use. After copying the historical prices to the spreadsheet, Downloader takes a pass through the data, calculating if each closing price is a downward or upward excursion. A green box is drawn if the stock price went up from the previous day and a red box is shown if it went down. The result of this is the green and red columns on the spreadsheet. These colored columns provide a quick and easy way to see the trending action of the stock. Downloader also allows for minor deviations in trends by using a special technique called counter trend days (CTD's). On these days, changes in trend direction are ignored. Visit our website for a more detailed explanation of Downloader and other useful technical analysis tools.