historical stock data starting from 1900
Robert Shiller published US Stock Market data from 1871.  Ken French also has historical data on his website.  Damodaran has a bunch of historical data, here is some historical S&P data. Good day! Did a little research by using oldest public company (Dutch East India Company, VOC, traded in Amsterdam Stock Exchange) as search criteria and found this lovely graph from http://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-united-east-india-2013-11?IR=T :  Why it is relevant? Below the image I found the source of data - Global Financial Data. I guess the answer to your question would be to go there: https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/index.html  Hope this helps and good luck in your search!
"The prices quoted are for currency pairs traded on the foreign exchange market. For currencies traded on these exchanges, the exchange rates of a given currency pair are determined by the market, so supply and demand, investor confidence, etc. all play a role. EBS and Reuters are the two primary trading platforms in the foreign exchange market, and much of the data on exchange rates comes from them. Websites will usually get their data either from these sources directly or from a data provider that in turn gets it from EBS, Reuters, or another data source like Bloomberg or Haver Analytics. These data sources aren't free, however.  In the US, many contracts, transactions, etc. that involve exchange rates use the exchange rate data published by the Federal Reserve. You might see this in contracts that specify to use ""the exchange rate published by the Federal Reserve at 12 pm (noon) on date --some date--"". You can also look at the Federal Reserve Economic Data, which maintains data series of historical daily, weekly, and monthly exchange rates for major currency pairs. These data are free, although they aren't realtime. Data for each business day is mostly updated the next business day." Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service. Well your gripe is using historic data to estimate VAR. That is separate topic. Either way however something that happens twice a century cant be considered an outlier and if you choose to use historic data then such things need to be included. For implied volatility it is okey to use Black and scholes but what to do with the historical volatility which carry the effect of past prices as a predictor of future prices.And then precisely the conditional historical volatility.i suggest that you must go with the process like, for stock returns  1) first download stock prices into excel sheet 2) take the natural log of (P1/po) 3) calculate average of the sample  4) calculate square of (X-Xbar) 5) take square root of this and you will get the standard deviation of your required data. At this time, Google Finance doesn't support historical return or dividend data, only share prices.  The attributes for mutual funds such as return52 are only available as real-time data, not historical.   Yahoo also does not appear to offer market return data including dividends. For example, the S&P 500 index does not account for dividends--the S&P ^SPXTR index does, but is unavailable through Yahoo Finance. Generally, when I run across this kind of situation, I look for the Investor Relations section of the corporate website for a 'Stock Information' (or similar) tab or link.   This usually contains information explaining the different shares classes, how they relate (if at all), voting and/or dividend rights, and taxation differences for the different classes. However, I have trouble finding such a page on a central BYD corporate investor relations page.   I did find this page detailing the HK1211 shares: http://www.byd.com/investor/base_information.html.  I don't know what or why, but something tells me this is an older page. Searching on, I also found this page which looks newer and clarifies that the difference you are seeing is between 'A' and 'H' shares. http://www.byd.cn/BYDEnglish/basic/article.jsp?articleId=1524676.  (I'm guessing but I'd think somewhere in the announcements on this byd.cn site, you may find more details of any structural differences between share classes -- I just didn't want to page through them all.) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=EDV+Historical+Prices shows this which matches Vanguard: Mar 24, 2014  0.769 Dividend Your download link doesn't specify dates which makes me wonder if it is a cumulative distribution or something else as one can wonder how did you ensure that the URL is specifying to list only the most recent distribution and not something else. For example, try this URL which specifies date information in the a,b,c,d,e,f parameters: http://real-chart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=EDV&a=00&b=29&c=2014&d=05&e=16&f=2014&g=v&ignore=.csv I think Infochimps has what you are looking for: NYSE and NASDAQ.