Subject: Re: OT: Bad day for data moochers
When I use google sheets, the historical data does not adjust for dividends. It does adjust for splits. Is there a function that gives dividend adjusted pricing?
Not that I know of. And there's a reason.
Dividend adjusted pricing is dynamic. As you go backward in time you have to adjust the price to account for all the dividends between then and now. When a dividend occurs, ALL the historical prices must be adjusted for it.
Here's an example. I have the yahoo weekly historical data for RSP that I downloaded on 11/3/2020
Date Open High Low Close Adj Close
4/28/03 25.25 25.969999 25.1675 25.969999 20.055201
5/5/23 26.02 26.352501 25.8375 26.2125 20.24246
and the data just grabbed now, 9/9/2024
Date Open High Low Close Adj Close
Apr 28, 2003 25.25 25.97 25.17 25.97 18.77
May 5, 2003 26.02 26.35 25.84 26.21 18.95
So as you see, to have a valid adj close to use you must download the data for all the dates that you use, at each time you use different dates.
It is MUCH easier to compute the adjusted closes yourself, using the actual close price and actual dividends. As long as you have those. AFAIK, all the data sources adjust the close price & dividends for splits.
BTW, adj close for dividends is wrong anyway. Everybody calculates as if the dividend was reinvested on the ex-div date, but that is not what happens. The reinvestment is not done until later when the dividend is paid, which can be days or weeks later.
It is not clear to me if =googlefinance() gives dividends for stocks.
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Well, well, well. Isn't this interesting.....Buried away in the saved HTML in addition to the above, there is some JSON data where the "adjclose" field has: 18.774974822998047, 18.950286865234375
and the "close" field has 25.969999313354492, 26.212499618530273
Yahoo isn't as clever as they thought they were. Shhhh