Tax time is approaching and it’s always a chore to calculate capital gains for my taxes. I was looking around the web to see if any of the free stock ticker sites had a way that I could just submit a bunch of ticker symbols and dates and generate a table of historical stock prices. I mean, how difficult is that? Yahoo has a great web interface for aggregating current stock quotes and even tabulated historical data for one stock but no way to tabulate a groups of ticker symbols historical data. Big Charts (now owned by MarketWatch) has a clean interface for getting a single historical stock quote for a particular day but no tabulated historical quote data. Analyzerxl.com has a commercial tool that does this and a lot more but for now I don’t need more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any such site to serve my needs. I thought about building a server-based tool to collect this information but I believe this would violate terms of usage. So instead, I made a simple tool that simply builds links to Big Charts’ historical price lookups. Note that if your stock has split in the time since you bought it until now, BigCharts will show you the “split-adjusted” price. Each link that is generated will launch a new window, or tab, to a Big Charts page for that stock and date.

Disclaimers:

• I am in no way affiliated with Big Charts or MarketWatch (an excellent news source by the way).
• I read the terms of use and I can’t see any violations with direct linking to their historical quote pages. If anyone can see such a violation, I will be happy to modify this page as necessary.
• Credit: Dustin Diaz’s site provided me a starting point for the functionality.