FirstRate Data Expands Historical Stock Dataset with Enhanced Features

China, 16th Sep 2024, -
 

FirstRate Data, a leading provider of financial market data, has announced a significant expansion of its historical stock dataset, now offering coverage back to the year 2000. This extension, coupled with the inclusion of dividend adjustments and ticker mapping, represents a major upgrade to their already robust financial data offerings.

Extended Historical Coverage

The expansion of FirstRate Data's historical stock dataset to cover the period from 2000 onwards is a game-changer for financial analysts, researchers, and quantitative traders. This extended timeframe allows for more comprehensive backtesting of trading strategies, deeper historical analysis, and improved long-term trend identification.

By providing data that spans multiple market cycles, including the dot-com bubble burst, the 2008 financial crisis, and the recent COVID-19 market disruptions, FirstRate Data enables users to gain invaluable insights into market behavior across various economic conditions.

Dividend Adjustments: A Crucial Addition

One of the most significant enhancements to the dataset is the inclusion of dividend adjustments. Dividends are critical in calculating total stock returns as they can form a significant portion of a stock's returns. FirstRate Data now provides both unadjusted and dividend-adjusted price data, providing a cleaner price series for backtesting.

How Dividend Adjustments Work

When a company pays a dividend, the stock price typically drops by approximately the amount of the dividend on the ex-dividend date. To account for this, FirstRate Data applies an adjustment factor to all prior prices in the series. The adjustment factor is calculated as:

1 - (Dividend Amount / Prior Day's Close Price)

For example, if a stock closes at $100 and pays a $2 dividend, the adjustment factor would be 0.98. All historical prices are then multiplied by this factor to create the dividend-adjusted series.

This adjustment ensures that calculated returns accurately reflect the total return an investor would have received, including both price appreciation and dividend income. It's particularly important for long-term analysis and when comparing the performance of dividend-paying stocks against non-dividend-paying stocks2.

Comprehensive Ticker Mapping

Another valuable feature introduced with this update is comprehensive ticker mapping. Companies often change ticker symbols due to various corporate actions such as mergers, acquisitions, or rebranding (for example FB to META). This can create challenges when analyzing long-term historical data since the stock exchanges do not provide a mapping for the ticker change meaning that the stock's historical price series often only extends back to the inception of the current ticker.

FirstRate Data's ticker mapping system addresses this issue by providing a seamless connection between historical and current ticker symbols. This feature ensures continuity in data analysis, even when companies have undergone significant changes over the years.

For instance, if a company changed its ticker from "OLDCO" to "NEWCO" in 2010, the system will automatically link these tickers, allowing users to retrieve a continuous dataset without manual intervention.   

Media Contact

Organization: FirstRateData team

Contact Person: Sunny Bundel

Website: https://firstratedata.com/

Email: support@firstratedata.com

Contact Number: 85227210116

City: Hong Kong

State: Hong Kong

Country:China

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