Hope everyone is having a wonderful day. My previous discourse on student loans could be a downer (along with many other things economic, but I have Hopium :)
One of my blog readers from London asked about where there is useful free data about the US (besides Yahoo finance). Well, readers it is everywhere. When I worked on my thesis (and built my event server) I attached to data from everywhere I could lay my hands on it. OK, I was not any more accurate than most economists from aggregating all the data and forecasting, but I learned where there is a lot of really useful data.
FRED - The Federal Reserve of St. Louis Economic data site. http://research.stlouisfed.org/ Fred has a charting feature, and an API for plugging into Excel. There is information for GDP, total debt, inflation, Treasury rates and credit spreads. This is all free. This will provide you an MBA without the pain if you study all the data.
MSCI - http://www.msci.com/ This firm produces many indexes, and they will allow you to download almost all of its data for free. Their factsheets provide a lot of handy valuation data.
Yahoo! Finance -- http://finance.yahoo.com/ There is huge amounts of free data on the US stock market. I wrote an API to download end-of-day data to run business cycle analysis for bonds, notes, and stocks. For my event server, I attached into the ETF NAV that is published every 15 seconds, and then used a neural network (within the server) to evaluate up to the minute cycles. That was not useful, other than to use the NYSE tick data to verify ETFs NAV from Yahoo, but it was educational. In other words, the data is good -- using it for cycle analysis was not so valuable. The ETF NAV info is useful for selecting the most liquid ETFs.
Stockcharts.com - http://stockcharts.com/ In my opinion for intermediate term traders of US equity markets, Stockcharts.com is the top site. There are others out there, but the free charting on stockcharts is equal to anyone. It has data on the US stock market that goes clear back to the 1800s. This is useful, although I wish they would allow the data to be loaded to an Excel spreadsheet for free. If one is a market technical analyst, there is a huge amount of educational material. John Murphy has been writing about technical analysis for 30-40 years.
FINVIZ -- http://www.finviz.com/ -- the news aggregated in one place. There is always a useful exercise in scanning the news before the US markets open in NY to see what the "fear" and "greed" signs are in the headlines. The heat maps are interesting as well.
Kenneth R. French -- French Data :) OK that was a joke... http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/index.html Dr. French and I go back aways as I received a lot of my advanced economics training from him at Dartmouth. Today, I may have been an economist if he had been my sponsor at Tuck School of Business. If you want to apply Three-Factor Analysis, Dr. French's online data library makes 3FM (as it is known) available to you. If you are not familiar with statistics and you don't have SaS tools, you can purchase John Neufeld's "Learning Business Statistics with Excel".
Dr. Robert Schiller -- Economist (very famous) at Yale. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm Creator of the Schiller Housing Index. You can get all the data for his book "Irrational Exuberance" downloaded in Excel format. That is worth going to the site alone. But there is lots more There is bond data going back to 1871. He has data sets on housing data on big cities going back to 1970. (Horrible web site, but excellent data.)
Google Finance -- https://www.google.com/finance?tab=we I do not use this often, but that is very likely because I've used Yahoo Fiance for years. What is available on Google is equal in quality to Yahoo Finance.
CME Group -- http://www.cmegroup.com/ This is the place for commodities historical data. Real-time data costs a bundle of money, but historical data is free. Delayed quotes on CME/CBOT/COMEX is free. They have a free API, but you will need Java; at least last year they did not have an Excel and/or ODBC API available. This is where SWAP data is stored for the Global economy (although I know some of you will report that is not where all the SWAP data is, but to my knowledge 100% of the SWAPs for the US are here.
Well readers: That should keep you busy for a while :)
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