Stock Quotes Data Sources

In today’s article we will show you, how you can create a real-time information screen for your company, where you display real-time stock quotes information on your monitor. DataPoint technology is used here, as a PowerPoint add-on, to display real-time information from databases, Excel and information sources over the internet. In this article, we will use a random company; Accenture. A world-wide consulting and technology company.

At Google, you can retrieve the current stock quote of this company. The stock symbol or abbreviation is ACN and was traded at the New York Stock Exchange.

We can find the stock quote at various locations on the internet. A good source to exchange this information is Yahoo. Yahoo has a free service available to look up information. Stock quotes is part of that.

Navigate to http://developer.yahoo.com/yql and first, set the responses to XML. At the YQL Query, type in:

Select * from yahoo.finance.quotes where symbol = "ACN"

and when you hit the Test button, then you will get the following result.

The YQL service is returning the current stock information of this company in XML format. The response looks like this;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<query xmlns:yahoo="http://www.yahooapis.com/v1/base.rng"
 yahoo:count="1" yahoo:created="2016-03-18T09:05:06Z" yahoo:lang="en-US">
 <results>
 <quote symbol="ACN">
 <Ask>108.61</Ask>
 <AverageDailyVolume>3070110</AverageDailyVolume>
 <Bid>108.60</Bid>
 <AskRealtime/>
 <BidRealtime/>
 <BookValue>9.43</BookValue>
 <Change_PercentChange>+0.97 - +0.90%</Change_PercentChange>
 <Change>+0.97</Change>
 <Commission/>
 <Currency>USD</Currency>
 <ChangeRealtime/>
 <AfterHoursChangeRealtime/>
 <DividendShare>2.20</DividendShare>
 <LastTradeDate>3/17/2016</LastTradeDate>
 <TradeDate/>
 <EarningsShare>4.75</EarningsShare>
 <ErrorIndicationreturnedforsymbolchangedinvalid/>
 <EPSEstimateCurrentYear>5.22</EPSEstimateCurrentYear>
 <EPSEstimateNextYear>5.73</EPSEstimateNextYear>
 <EPSEstimateNextQuarter>1.42</EPSEstimateNextQuarter>
 <DaysLow>107.19</DaysLow>
 <DaysHigh>108.67</DaysHigh>
 <YearLow>88.18</YearLow>
 <YearHigh>109.86</YearHigh>
 <HoldingsGainPercent/>
 <AnnualizedGain/>
 <HoldingsGain/>
 <HoldingsGainPercentRealtime/>
 <HoldingsGainRealtime/>
 <MoreInfo/>
 <OrderBookRealtime/>
 <MarketCapitalization>68.17B</MarketCapitalization>
 <MarketCapRealtime/>
 <EBITDA>5.20B</EBITDA>
 <ChangeFromYearLow>20.38</ChangeFromYearLow>
 <PercentChangeFromYearLow>+23.11%</PercentChangeFromYearLow>
 <LastTradeRealtimeWithTime/>
 <ChangePercentRealtime/>
 <ChangeFromYearHigh>-1.30</ChangeFromYearHigh>
 <PercebtChangeFromYearHigh>-1.18%</PercebtChangeFromYearHigh>
 <LastTradeWithTime>4:02pm - &lt;b&gt;108.56&lt;/b&gt;</LastTradeWithTime>
 <LastTradePriceOnly>108.56</LastTradePriceOnly>
 <HighLimit/>
 <LowLimit/>
 <DaysRange>107.19 - 108.67</DaysRange>
 <DaysRangeRealtime/>
 <FiftydayMovingAverage>101.36</FiftydayMovingAverage>
 <TwoHundreddayMovingAverage>102.47</TwoHundreddayMovingAverage>
 <ChangeFromTwoHundreddayMovingAverage>6.09</ChangeFromTwoHundreddayMovingAverage>
 <PercentChangeFromTwoHundreddayMovingAverage>+5.95%</PercentChangeFromTwoHundreddayMovingAverage>
 <ChangeFromFiftydayMovingAverage>7.19</ChangeFromFiftydayMovingAverage>
 <PercentChangeFromFiftydayMovingAverage>+7.10%</PercentChangeFromFiftydayMovingAverage>
 <Name>Accenture plc Class A Ordinary</Name>
 <Notes/>
 <Open>107.59</Open>
 <PreviousClose>107.59</PreviousClose>
 <PricePaid/>
 <ChangeinPercent>+0.90%</ChangeinPercent>
 <PriceSales>2.17</PriceSales>
 <PriceBook>11.41</PriceBook>
 <ExDividendDate>10/14/2015</ExDividendDate>
 <PERatio>22.87</PERatio>
 <DividendPayDate>11/13/2015</DividendPayDate>
 <PERatioRealtime/>
 <PEGRatio>2.09</PEGRatio>
 <PriceEPSEstimateCurrentYear>20.80</PriceEPSEstimateCurrentYear>
 <PriceEPSEstimateNextYear>18.95</PriceEPSEstimateNextYear>
 <Symbol>ACN</Symbol>
 <SharesOwned/>
 <ShortRatio>3.10</ShortRatio>
 <LastTradeTime>4:02pm</LastTradeTime>
 <TickerTrend/>
 <OneyrTargetPrice>112.83</OneyrTargetPrice>
 <Volume>2876720</Volume>
 <HoldingsValue/>
 <HoldingsValueRealtime/>
 <YearRange>88.18 - 109.86</YearRange>
 <DaysValueChange/>
 <DaysValueChangeRealtime/>
 <StockExchange>NYQ</StockExchange>
 <DividendYield>2.05</DividendYield>
 <PercentChange>+0.90%</PercentChange>
 </quote>
 </results>
</query>

One of the most important thing for DataPoint is the Endpoint URL. This is the url that we will use in DataPoint in order to retrieve the YQL information.

https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=Select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.quotes%20where%20symbol%20%3D%20%22ACN%22&format=xml&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys

Using DataPoint for Stock Quotes

We already showed you some general information on stock quotes data and now we will move on to DataPoint.  We will show you how to display this information on your PowerPoint slides.

In PowerPoint, click the DataPoint menu option and the click the List button of the Connections group.

Select the XML node and click the Add connection button.

At the File, type in the YQL endpoint and hit OK.

The connection is now added to the list of XML connections. Rename the connection text and hit the Add query button.

Here you get a list of data tables returned by the YQL service. I choose the quote data table here and leave the refresh rate to 60 seconds. Every minute, DataPoint will requery the YQL source for new data. Hit OK to close.

Rename the query text to a better name. At the bottom of the connections list, you will now see a preview of the data returned by the YQL data service. Hit OK to close.

Bind Stock Data to Slide

To bind stock data to slide, start with a new PowerPoint presentation and set a nice image as background.

Select a first text box and click DataPoint, Text box.

Leave the Data connection to the default one, and as Column choose LastTradePriceOnly. You will see a preview value of 108.56.

Click the Texts tab and set the Prefix to $.

Hit OK to close the form and to link the dynamic value to this text box.

Repeat the same actions for other text boxes and link the text boxes to other columns that are available at the data source.

Now, you can run this PowerPoint presentation as a kiosk slide show on a large television and display the stock information in real-time.