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Get Stock Prices with Xojo
Exploring two ways to get stock info
Issue: 16.1 (January/February 2018)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 40,238
Starting Page Number: 42
Article Number: 16110
Resource File(s):
project16110.zip Updated: 2018-01-01 22:32:26
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/
Excerpt of article text...
I'm certainly no day trader, but I got interested in the stock market in the late 1990s when Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer. Back then the market valued Apple a paltry $3B, and Apple had $3B in cash, so essentially Wall Street was saying all of Apple's property, patents, and the Mac business was worth zero dollars.
I didn't know much, but as a Mac fan, I knew that
had to be wrong, so I started buying APPL at around $10/share.In the decades since, I've had lots of fun watching Apple become the most valuable company on the planet (see Figure 1). Naturally, in retrospect, I wish I'd invested a
lot more in 1997 when the shares were so cheap!I still don't know much of businesses beyond Apple and the tech market, but I've picked up a few shares of Amazon and other companies. It's fun to keep an eye on those investments (at least when they're going up).
Now I can do that via Apple's Stock app on the iPhone, but it only tells me the current price, not the value of my portfolio. If I was a "real" investor, I'd undoubtedly get some serious tools for tracking everything, but for years I've just been using a math app I already had that included stock quotes.
(I'm not real comfortable giving my financial info to cloud or non-banking entities. Even if they're respectable now, if they run into money problems, they could decide to sell my details to advertisers or whoever. There's also the possibility they could get hacked. So I prefer stand-alone solutions where the data is all on my own machine.)
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