Investing in the stock market takes a lot of courage, a lot of research, and a lot of wisdom. One of the most important steps is understanding how a stock has performed in the past. Of course, the past is not a guarantee of future performance. But it’s still very helpful to know if a stock has historically been volatile, stable, or had a consistent range.
Use MarketWatch’s Historical Lookup Tool
It’s pretty simple to find, say, the stock price of General Electric right now. But what if you need to know the price on a specific date in the past?
Knowing the difference between the stock price of GE today and a past stock price may be important for your taxes, or you may be trying to create a GE stock price forecast. Either way, you can easily find what you need using MarketWatch’s historical stock prices lookup tool.
When you enter the ticker symbol and a date, you’ll get the information about the day’s trading for that stock. The close will be noted, along with the day’s high and low. The 52-week high and low will also be listed. You can get any stock price on any date for free, quickly and easily.
Find Historical Information on NASDAQ
For any stock listed on the NASDAQ, you can find historical information at NASDAQ.com. Look up the historical quotes page, and enter the ticker symbols you’re interested in.
For instance, you can look for the GOOG stock price (Google), AMZN stock price (Amazon), and more. The results will show on one page, and you can switch between stocks by clicking on the appropriate tab on the results page.
The default search is 3 months, but you can change it to any range up to 10 years. Today’s stock price will be first. For instance, the Amazon stock price today would be the first entry in your search of AMZN, but you could scroll down to see older results.
Using Investopedia’s Historical Securities Quotes
In the Markets section of Investopedia there is another resource that can help you get the older stock quotes you need. You simply search for the ticker symbol and then navigate to “Historical Data.”
This will show you the historical stock price of the security you chose. For example, you can search TSLA to find the Tesla stock price.
One thing that is especially helpful in Investopedia’s tool is that you can set the date range you’re interested in. You may not need to know what the Boeing stock price is today, but you need to know what it was in January through May of 2008. You can set the range and get a list of daily results. You can also choose between a display of daily, weekly, or monthly results. This can help you get a broader view of the stock’s performance.
Use Historical Data Wisely
As you do your research, be sure to use the data you find wisely. Past performance can definitely give you a strong indicator of how stable and strong security is, but nothing is guaranteed.
Diversified investments are important for exactly that reason. You never know when major news will break and plummet the value of a company or an industry. Be careful with your investments and they will serve you well.
