UK fund price download issue

[briandinho]

hi all,

I have been using AM happily in the UK for a couple of years now. I have the investments set to lookup prices from either Google Finance or UK Yahoo Finance - these have been the most reliable for my various London domiciled tickers.

I have a problem with 3 Legal and General funds since the end of May 2013 - I don't think this is an AM problem as I have other funds still successfully looked up, but I wondered if other users had the same/similar issues and maybe an explanation - thanks.

One example is the UK Index R Acc units - ISIN code GB0001036531

I checked with L&G - the fund code is still valid. For some reason the google and yahoo sites no longer appear to recognise the code - I can get live info from the morningstar website with the code, but that is not an option in the download prices dropdown in AM.

Any help gratefully received.

cheers
briandinho

[RLebeau]

The symbol for the "L&G UK Index R Acc" investment on Yahoo Finance UK is "GB0001036531.L". Note the added ".L" suffix. Yahoo adds suffixes to investment symbols on foreign exchanges (".L" is the London Stock Exchange), as documented on Yahoo:

Exchange Suffixes

To get a quote from a company traded on any of the below financial markets, enter the symbol and the suffix. For example, if you are looking for a quote for Vodafone on the London Exchange, enter "VOD.L" in the quote box.

This is actually mentioned in the AceMoney FAQS:

My stocks or mutual funds are not known to AceMoney. How can AceMoney download them?

The vast majority of the investment quotes can be obtained from Yahoo Finance. In this case AceMoney uses the same symbols as Yahoo! Finance in order to download the stock prices. Please use Yahoo! Symbol Lookup to find the stock. By default the stocks are downloaded from the United States Stock Exchanges. If you are interested in other stock exchanges, an appropriate suffix should be added to the symbol. Here is a full list of exchanges.

There is no "GB0001036531" or "GB0001036531.L" symbol on Google Finance, but it does have a "Legal & General UK 100 Index Trust R Acc" investment whose symbol is "LG_UK_100_173EGCE". That symbol does not appear on Yahoo or Morningstar. I don't know if it is the same investment you are using, though.

[briandinho]

Many thanks Remy,

In some ways the plot thickens. I added the .L suffix and can now successfully do a live download from Yahoo and Yahoo Uk finance sites. Weirdly, however, they both now return a price of 0.00, whereas the performance charts on various sites show price lines of approx 2.2.

I think I'm back to an L&G fund/data problem, but thanks for the technical help.

cheers
briandinho

[brizzle]

Sorry to piggyback on your thread, but I'm having a similar problem with three L&G funds (GB0030534548, GB0030534654 and GB0030516297). They are pension funds, so they are a bit harder to find quotes for. Neither Yahoo nor Bloomberg track these funds.

Ft.com has quotes for them, but when I set them up in AceMoney to use "Financial Times", updates just return £0.00.

Using any other data source returns a popup with "Internet connection error or invalid investment symbol!". Adding the ".L" London suffix also produces this popup.

Any Ideas?

Simon

[BobW]

I don't know if it works in AceMoneybut try adding .GBX instead of .L, might work in the FT but I don't think it does in Yahoo

[brizzle]

Hi Bob,

Sorry, but adding .GBX just produces the "invalid investment" popup again. Adding :GBX returns £0.00 for the fund price.

Simon

[BobW]

Apologies, meant to say :GBX, but looks like that doesn't work either, I originally had trouble even finding a code for my fund (Santander), then when I found it I didn't realise about adding the .L, so it took me nearly 9 months before |I could track it, I hope someone else can come up with a fix for you, and the OP

[brizzle]

Given that setting the fund symbol incorrectly generates the correct error, but getting the symbol right returns £0.00, I'm starting to think that AceMoney isn't parsing the data returned from the Financial Times website properly.

Is there any way for the end user to play with the parser formatting?

[RLebeau]

That is hard to say without seeing the actual fund name you are querying. In the course of this discussion, I have seen Yahoo report £0.00 for some funds I have tested. Maybe FT has the same problem. Did you verify that the FT website is not reporting £0.00 but AceMoney sees it as £0.00? If that is the case, then submit a bug report to MechCAD. Either way, to answer your question, no, there is no option to tweak AceMoney's parsers.