Question of Creating Function

Hi everyone,

I am a student from Education field and wish to self-teach myself the matlab, while studying through the handouts from my friends, I found an exercise I have difficulties to solve since this will be the first exercise I will do. Please help me out.

The exercise states as follow:

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Code the following in MATLAB

The Yahoo Finance API can be used to returns stock price data for a given symbol. In this example, YHOO daily price from 4/13/2009 to 1/28/2010 is requested. http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=YHOO&d=0&e=28&f=2010&g=d&a=3&b=13&c=2009&ignore=.csv

The details of the parameters are as follows:

 s Ticker symbol (YHOO in the example)
 a The "from month"• - 1
 b The "from day"• (two digits)
 c The "from year"•
 d The "to month"• - 1
 e The "to day"• (two digits)
 f The "to year"•
 g d for day, m for month, y for yearly

Write a function that reads an Excel file for a number of stock symbols, then for each symbol the function

• sends requests to Yahoo Finance API repeatedly, retrieves the response and stores the response in a variable
• gets the Adjusted Closing Price column
• stores the Adjusted Closing Price as a column (without the header)in the output variable

The function takes the API parameters above as the input variables (except “s”). For N symbols, there should be N columns in the output variable.

Write sample code that calls the function above, return data into a variable, save the data to an Excel file.

Hint: You can use MATLAB function urlread() to read the response and store the result in a variable as follows:

x=urlread('http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=YHOO&d=0&e=28&f=2010&g=d&a= 3&b=13&c=2009&ignore=.csv')

To split rows, use this syntax

data=strsplit(x, '\n');

For each row, in order to split it into multiple columns

arow=strsplit(sprintf('%s',row{:}),',')

in which the variable “row” is an element in the cell array “data”. “arrow” is a cell array

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Thank you!

[Walter Roberson]

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/6200-tutorial-how-to-ask-a-question-on-answers-and-get-a-fast-answer

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/8026-best-way-s-to-master-matlab

[Jan]

Please explain your difficulties with any details. Otherwise it is hard to guess how we can help you.

[Edward L.]

I know that I can use the link and change some parameter to gain the data from the Yahoo Finance API. http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=IBM&d=9&e=25&f=2014&g=d&a=1&b=28&c=2013&ignore=.csv

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But I don't know what the exercise is asking for...

I know very basic about matlab regarding read a Excel file as xlsread(filename). Basically I need to know what the exercise want me to do...and what should I do to begin with.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

This seems like a pretty challenging exercise for a brand-new MATLAB student. Could I suggest you try something simpler first, such as the MATLAB Academy introductory tutorial?

[Edward L.]

I thought it is challenging but I need this one for another course I took this semester. So I would try to solve this. I just don't know where to begin with.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

The first thing the exercise wants you to do is read an excel file to get a list of stock symbols. Then it wants you to go through each stock symbol that you just read in, and request data from Yahoo Finance for that stock symbol. For each stock symbol, out of the data that is retrieved from Yahoo, extract the Adjusted Closing Price column, and add that closing price as a new column on an overall variable you are building up. At the end, the overall variable should have one column of closing prices for each stock symbol.