How and Where can I easily pull data for the Dow 30?
The current Dow divisor is in Historical Divisor Changes. The OpenOffice GetQuote function offers fields for current dividend either in dollars or yield.
The biggest issue with Yahoo Finance is the recent change to the API in May. The data is good quality, includes both dividend/split adjusted and raw prices, but it's much more difficult to pull the data with packages like R quantmod than before.  Google is fine as well, but there are some missing data points and you can't unadjust the prices (or is it that they're all unadjusted and you can't get adjusted? I can't recall). I use Google at home, when I can't pull from Bloomberg directly and when I'm not too concerned with accuracy.  Quandl seems quite good but I haven't tried them. There's also a newer website called www.alphavantage.co, I haven't tried them yet either but their data seems to be pretty good quality from what I've heard. "I thought I'd see if the credit card companies had anything to say about this while trying to get merchants to sign up. I went to visa.com, clicked ""Run Your Business"" in the top nav, then ""Accept Visa Payments"". This page has a ""More benefits of accepting Visa"" link with an overlay (which I can't easily link directly to), which includes these lines: While the average cash transaction is $17, credit card purchases average $70 while debit card purchases average $36.² ² Visa Payment Panel Study (2Q11 to 1Q12 time period); Visa MARS Data: March 2015 – May 2015  That obviously doesn't tell the entire story (I suspect people are more likely to pull out cash when they're just buying a stick of gum, and more more likely to pull out a card when they're buying large electronics), but certainly there is some evidence from the credit card companies themselves that people spend more when using cards, which is one of the aspects they use to convince merchants to accept cards. I think the best evidence that people spend more is that more and more merchants accept cards. Accepting cards comes with some significant costs (though it's important to keep in mind that accepting cash can come with some significant costs as well). I suspect that merchants wouldn't do so unless the increased sales that they get for accepting cards makes up for the fees that they need to pay and the equipment they need to buy to accept them (not to mention the risks of chargebacks and the like)." "Let me run some simplistic numbers, ignoring inflation. You have the opportunity to borrow up to 51K. What matters (and varies) is your postgraduation salary. Case 1 - you make 22K after graduation. You pay back 90 a year for 30 years, paying off at most 2700 of the loan. In this case, whether you borrow 2,800 or 28,000 makes no difference to the paying-off. You would do best to borrow as much as you possibly can, treating it as a grant. Case 2 - you make 100K after graduation. You pay back over 7K a year. If you borrowed the full 51, after 7 or 8 years it would be paid off (yeah, yeah, inflation, interest, but maybe that might make it 9 years.) In this case, the more you borrow the more you have to pay back, but you can easily pay it back, so you don't care. Invest your sponsorships and savings into something long term since you know you won't be needing to draw on them. Case 3 - you make 30K after graduation. Here, the payments you have to make actually impact how much disposable income you have. You pay back 810 a year, and over 30 years that's about 25K of principal. It will be less if you account for some (even most) of the payment going to interest, not principal. Anything you borrow above 25K (or the lower, more accurate amount) is ""free"". If you borrow substantially less than that (by using your sponsorship, savings, and summer job) you may be able to stop paying sooner than 30 years. But even if you borrow only 12K (or half the more accurate number), it will still be 15 years of payments. Running slightly more realistic versions of these calculations where your salary goes up, and you take interest into account, I think you will discover, for each possible salary path, a number that represents how much of your loan is really loan: everything above that is actually a grant you do not pay back. The less you are likely to make, the more of it is really grant. On top of that, it seems to me that no matter the loan/grant ratio,  ""borrow as much as you can from this rather bizarre source"" appears to be the correct answer. In the cases where it's all loan, you have a lot of income and don't care much about this loan payment. Borrowing the whole 51K lets you invest all the money you get while you're a student, and you can use the returns on those investments to make the loan payments." "My question is, using previous data how do I calculate my returns? ""Stupid"" is the person who does not ask. Better to have visited first, but even asking after the fact will get you an education, at a very low cost.  You would only see those returns had you invested at the beginning of the period advertised. ""Past results are not a guarantee of future returns.""  Since we have no idea where you are in life, there's little advice I can give you except to invite you to learn. You can easily spend 100 hours on this Stack reading advice on the beginning investor, and every stage after that. We all needed to start somewhere, and in your case, just showing up was a great first step." "Yes, there is a very good Return vs Risk graph put out at riskgrades.com.  Look at it soon, because it will be unavailable after 6-30-11.  The RA (return analysis) graph is what I think you are looking for. The first graph shown is an ""Average Return"", which I was told was for a 3 year period.  Three period returns of 3, 6 and 12 months, are also available.  You can specify the ticker symbols of funds or stocks you want a display of.  For funds, the return includes price and distributions (total return), but only price movement for stocks - per site webmaster. I've used the graphs for a few years, since Forbes identified it as a ""Best of the Web"" site.  Initially, I found numerous problems with some of the data and was able to work with the webmaster to correct them.  Lately though, they have NOT been correcting problems that I bring to their attention.  For example, try the symbols MUTHX, EDITX, AWSHX and you'll see that the Risk Grades on the graphs are seriously in error, and compress the graph results and cause overwriting and poor readability. If anyone knows of a similar product, I'd like to know about it.  Thanks,  George" "From the Vanguard page -  This seemed the easiest one as S&P data is simple to find. I use MoneyChimp to get -  which confirms that Vanguard's page is offering CAGR, not arithmetic Average. Note: Vanguard states ""For U.S. stock market returns, we use the Standard & Poor's 90 from 1926 through March 3, 1957,"" while the Chimp uses data from Nobel Prize winner, Robert Shiller's site." "the ""how"" all depends on your level of computer savvy. Are you an Excel spreadsheet user or can you write in programming languages such as python? Either approach have math functions that make the calculation of ROI and Volatility trivial. If you're a python coder, then look up ""pandas"" (http://pandas.pydata.org/) - it handles a lot of the book-keeping and downloading of end of day equities data. With a dozen lines of code, you can compute ROI and volatility." Just look at the filing date of the 10Q and then Yahoo the closing price or Google it. I assume you are looking for market reactions to SEC filings?   If you want to look at the closing stock price for the end of the period which the filing covers, it's like on the first page of the filing when the period (either quarterly or yearly) ends. This data is generally less useful, however, because it really is just another day in the market for the company. The actual release of the data to the public is more important.