Creating a vector of stock symbols

Hi everyone I'm attempting to create a vector of stock symbols which I will run through a function to retrieve information about the symbol. When I go to create a vector which I plan to run through the function

symbol=['NLY', 'CSCO', 'RAI'];

it returnes that it's equal to

NLYCSCORAI,

is there a way to make to make it work where the entered symbol in the vector can be used this way? I need it to return 'NLY' to have the function work properly, otherwise there is a breakdown in the program. Also I've found when I do a loop it strips the number of letters specified by the loop instead of treating whats inside of the '...' as a unit.

here is the script if you need the function I can get that as well

symbol=['NLY', 'CSCO', 'RAI'];  

[hist_date, hist_high, hist_low, hist_open, hist_close, hist_vol] =      get_hist_google_stock_data('symbol');

% Plot Daily Hi vs Low
figure
plot([hist_low,hist_high,log(hist_vol)]);
title('Stock');
xlabel('Days Back');
ylabel('Price');
legend('Blue=Daily High','Green=Daily Low','Red=Log(Volume)')

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

[] on strings (char array) concatenates the strings. To hold several strings of different lengths you have to use a cell array:

symbols = {'NLY', 'CSCO', 'RAI'};

to access your symbols you use the {} operator to index into the cell array instead of the matrix ():

for symbidx = 1:numel(symbols)
   symbol = symbols{symbidx}
   [hist_date, hist_high, hist_low, hist_open, hist_close, hist_vol] =      get_hist_google_stock_data(symbol);
   %...
end

[Zack Bayhan]

Awesome thanks, I will play around with this to see if I can't get it going here in a bit.