Sunday, August 14, 2011

My preferred end-of-day SGX price/volume data vendor

Update: This product is no longer available on the market. If someone knows what happened to the developer Cho Sing Kum, do drop a note. I emailed him but no reply.

There are 2 types of analytical toolboxes available to investors - Fundamental Analysis (FA) and Technical Analysis (TA). Some investors rely on financial statements only for their investments (FA) and some traders rely on price/volume charts only for their trading (TA). I think it is wise to rely on both. You need TA because it provides useful market information like whether the stock you are buying is in an uptrend or downtrend, the strength of the buying and selling, how it reacts to corrections, whether a climax buying or selling is happening ...  You use FA because it is common sense to read financial statements before buying a stock since you are buying part of a company. In the long-term, it is the financial performance of the company that drives the price.

You need data for both types of analysis (FA and TA). Financial statements are basic data for FA and the price/volume information is data for TA.

This post is about the best price/volume data vendor I have found for SGX stocks and indices. Please note that you will still need a Technical Analysis software like Metastock, Amibroker, TradeStation to present the data in a chart and analyse the data using technical indicators.

The best value-for-money bargain that SGX price/volume data is DataFolio.
http://www.technical-analysis.com/prodDataFolio.html

It is the cheapest in town. Other data vendors charge annual subscription of more than SGD100. For DataFolio, there is no annual subscription. You just pay a one-off SGD88. In terms of price, it is a no-brainer.

The data quality is superb. Its data source comes from SGX website itself, so I do not question its accuracy.

Prices for individual stocks are auto-adjusted for corporate events like stock-splits, rights and dividends. These auto-adjustments are needed so that awkward price gaps that distort analytical results are removed. However, I noticed that not all stocks are adjusted, at least not in a timely fashion.

Some may argue that this is not a good recommendation because there are free data vendors around like Yahoo. Although Yahoo provides price/volume data for free, it is not suitable for SGX stocks. Yahoo provides price data up to 2 decimal places. This is inadequate for the majority of SGX stocks which are penny stocks and require price data up to 3 decimal places.

DataFolio provides historical price/volume data all the way back to 1987.

ChartNexus is also a good product for Technical Analysis. However, I prefer the flexibility of specialized TA software like Metastock or Amibroker which gives me the power to write my own proprietary indicators and algorithms. This is my edge as an engineer and it makes sense to make use of one's strengths to beat the competition.

I recommended DataFolio to a relative. He praised Mr Cho Sing Kum for his excellent technical support. Mr Cho is the creator of DataFolio. I do not have first-hand experience of his technical support service because being an engineer, I have a tendency to figure things out and solve problems myself. However, when I asked question on the ChartistUnited forum whom Mr Cho frequents, his response speed is simply incredible.

By the way, if you do buy DataFolio, please keep your password in a safe place. Mr Cho is quite sick of people asking for passwords. This is actually what prompted me to write this post to lend him support.

I am not paid to do advertisement for DataFolio. Mr Cho does not know who I am. I am just a grateful customer for a product that gives me value-for-money.

Lastly, this is a Singaporean product created by a Singaporean that beats all foreign competition hands-down. As a Singaporean, what is there not to support?

11 comments:

  1. yep, seems like datafolio is the only readily available historical source for a alot of market data for SGX counters...2 thumbs up :)

    cimtr/singstocks

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  2. Hi cimtr/singstocks,

    This is one recommendation which I am confident will be the right one. Which software are you using for our charts? Metastock?

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  3. Common stocks that are sometimes also called equities entitle the owner to vote at the company meetings. In addition, it provides an investor with an opportunity to receive dividends in profitable years.

    dividend stock Singapore

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  4. Hi - is the datafoilo database still works well as of today/now..? Many thanks..

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  5. can i check if the datafolio allows download as excel file format for those who don't have Amibroker or Metastock

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  6. Data inside datafolio can be exported to CSV format. Each stock will have its own .txt file with each line of data arranged like this: 19870706,1.460,1.500,1.340,1.460,2139000 (yyyymmdd, open, high, close, low, volume)

    Anonymous > Datafolio still working today.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I just tried their sample data to work with Wealth-Lab Developer and it didn't work. I got the symbols (just FOREX symbols) but no history. I wold like to test some strategies on a portfolio level using WLD and Singapore stocks. Any ideas for data?
    Btw, just because data is coming directly from an exchange doesn't make it good data. Good data takes a lot of work but it might be different with the SGX data.

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  8. Forgot to press the notify me button... Doing it now. :)

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  9. Anyone knows what happened to Datafolio? Have they moved URL or stopped operation? Would be a pity if it has ceased. Grateful for your advice.

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    Replies
    1. The company seems to have closed down. Hope the developer Cho Sing Kum is happily retired and is still in good health.

      No reply from him at all so far. Wonder what happened to him exactly.

      Delete
  10. Wealth-Lab is now on version 8. You can check out the best backtesting software at www.wealth-lab.com.

    ReplyDelete

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