Amibroker Charting Software, Chart Data, and Historical Price Quotes for the Philippine Stock Market – Guide on Getting Them

One of the most important tools in trading the Philippine Stock Market is a price chart used for technical analysis. However, how can you do technical analysis if you don’t have a charting software, or the historical data to read in your charting software? You’re in luck, as I detail in this post the steps in setting up your own chart for all active Philippine stocks.

Step 1: Getting Amibroker

In the local market, most Pinoys use Amibroker and MetaStock. Personally, I prefer Amibroker over MetaStock, primarily due to the fact that Amibroker is lighter on the system resources, and has an easier user interface as compared with MetaStock.

Anyway, you can download Amibroker here. Note that you have to pay for Amibroker in order to use it properly, and save all the changes and data that you will be doing. There is another way to get Amibroker for free, if you know what I mean. ;)

Step 2: Install Amibroker

To install Amibroker, simply run the installer application, and just follow all the steps of the installation process.

Step 3: Download PSEGet

Yeahbah of Absolute Traders have provided us Pinoys a convenient way to obtain PSE historical price data through his application, PSEGet. Details on how to download and use can be found in his site. Note that you need to have at least Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 installed on your machine. You can download it here.

Download PSEGet in this link.

You can also donate to feed his cats. :D

Step 4: Get PSE Historical Prices with PSEGet

After setting up PSEGET, you can now harvest PSE data direct from the Philippine Stock Exchange’s website.

Run PSEget, then click on the blue hyperlink: http://www.pse.com.ph/html/Quotations/2010, and then modify the year on the last part to the year that you wish to get data. If you would like to download historical data for the year 2006, simply replace 2010 on the http://www.pse.com.ph/html/Quotations/2010 with 2006. Just do the same for the other years. Just indicate the date range you wish to download.

Now, you can change the directory on which folder that the stock quotes will be placed. And for Amibroker, you should change the Date Format from MM/DD/YYYY to DD/MM/YYYY. For most users, you can leave all other fields on its default mode.

After specifying your data parameters, you can now click the “Give it to me!” It can take a long time, depending on the date range you specified.

Step 5: Import Historical Price Quotes to Amibroker

You’re almost there. Now, open Amibroker.

On the File Menu, select the Import Wizard.

 On the Import Wizard, click the Pick Files Button. Go to the destination folder of your downloaded stock quotes, and select all the stock quotes files, and click Open. You would then see a list of your selected stock quotes, and then, click Next.

On the next part, most users would just click Next, so for now, just click Next, and then click Finish. Amibroker would then import all the historical price data you have downloaded with PSEGet, to your Amibroker.

Step 6: Update Amibroker Everyday

Just repeat Steps 4 and 5 everyday, to make your Amibroker updated. The PSE usually uploads the closing quotes for the trading day between 2:00PM to 3:00PM. Just wait around 2:30PM before using PSEGet to download the stock quotes.

Note that you have to manually adjust stocks whenever there is a Stock Dividend, Stock Rights, Stock Split or Reverse Stock Split, etc. This is a bit tricky to do, and will discuss these issues on a later blog post.

Step 7: Learn/Practice Technical Analysis

Now that you have an updated chart of the Philippine Stock Market, you can now learn or practice technical analysis! Enjoy!

Credits go to Yeahbah! Of Absolute Traders for providing PSEGet for Free!

If you still need help in setting up your own PSE chart, you can contact me here.

Pinoy Stock Trader