Stock Symbol Converter (beta)
Try it out here: Stock Converter.
A week ago I've introduced a new feature, the Stock Symbol Converter (see the link "Stock Converter" in the left menu).
I had this idea for a while and have been ranting to myself a few times about how annoying it is to have stock symbols which are never the same depending on which website you use. Personally, I use many different sites for various reasons, sometimes I like the charts on ones (StockCharts / BigCharts for example), the price tables / news headlines (Yahoo Finance), sometimes I prefer to use a Canadian based website to track warrant prices (GlobeInvestor), SO, from this need came the idea to create a symbol converter.
So here comes the stock converter, a little tool I wrote this last Saturday. You can try it out here.
It's very simple, you just type in a bunch of symbols and specify what source format they are in (Yahoo, ValueForum, etc), then choose the destination format and then click Submit and you should get your converted list of symbols. This is a first version so bare with me, there are probably a few bugs here and there, but it works for the most part. Also, I have included a bunch of sites that I know, but obviously if you know other sites which should figure in there then please let me know.
Of course this won't make you rich but I figure if it can help you in your day-to-day investor tasks and it removes some "dumb" work off your shoulders (as it does for me) its all good.
I've purposely included many error / warning messages, simply to help debug for now. Here's a few examples if you're curious:
It works partly with indices, warrants and trusts, though there isn"t always an available conversion for various reasons. Usually because indice symbols differ between sites or sometimes because warrants / trusts information is not available on a given site.
For convenience, you'll notice that you can save the link (after you hit submit) into your favorites and load the page again with all the info you typed in. Basically, all the information the page needs is in the URL, so there's no need for login etc. Just save it in your favorites and load it later if you need to modify your stock list. Also, feel free to make different lists for different resources, there's no limit on how many pages / times you can use it.
I am currently working on various dashboard ideas, but am mainly thinking about building some kind of cross-site dashboard which combines together the power of various websites to bring into a single page all the relevant information I need for a birds eye view of my investments. Of course there's more than just charts / price tables to investing, but personally I find it highly useful to have some kind of big picture of how things are doing. So the need to have transparent stock-symbol conversion mostly came from this, as I'd like to build a page where I can just specify a bunch of stocks and then select whatever dashboard part I want to display and have the conversions done behind the scenes. For example, charts from StockCharts, BigCharts for warrants, price tables & news from Yahoo, message board links, etc. Anyways, I will post more on this once I get there
Anyway, I think it's useful, and I thought it may help my fellow investor friends, so enjoy!! And please, do not hesitate to give me feedback, I'm really looking forward to see what people think!
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