Saturday 3 January 2015

Microsoft Money Quote Updates

A great update to have - a new version of the updater from Gaier software has been released that now picks up more quotes for MS Money.

I've just downloaded the paid version as I think the developer deserves some benefit from their hard work.

You can view the details here:


The note from the developer is below:


I wanted to let you know I have released version 2.0 tonight! 

This version switches to an entirely new online quote service.  The new quote service was built for the new MSN.com and MSN Money websites, and is also used by the Windows 8 Finance app.  The new online quote service is more reliable, has better symbol coverage, and should be here to stay for a long time.  It is backed by a Morningstar quote feed.

The MSN Money team has communicated to me the “old” quote service will be shutdown Jan 5th.  It seems they pushed the date back from the originally planned date of Dec 22nd 2014.  Good for us because it gave me more time to update my program!

As discussed in my previous email, this change required a significant amount of re-work to MSMoneyQuotes due to the new “symbology” format.  And thus I changed MSMoneyQuotes’s major version from “1” to “2”.
The approach my program uses to access online quotes has changed.  Instead of a single step to get online quotes using the symbols as-is from the Money file, there are now two steps: 
1)      The first step is to “resolve symbols”.  That means my program needs to map the symbols in your Money file (e.g. $US:INDU)  to a symbol on MSN Money (e.g. 126.10.!DJI.126.$INDU).  It uses the same service used by MSN Money’s “Quote Search” auto-complete input box to perform the lookup.  See the “Help and Support” section at the bottom of this page for more information: http://gaiersoftware.com/Money/DetailsAndHelp
2)      If it can resolve the symbol, then it uses the special MSN Money symbols (e.g. 126.10.!DJI.126.$INDU) to fetch online quotes.

You can see the two steps above in action if you use the –v verbose option.

I have also fixed a couple problems reported to me with regards to the FT.com import feature.  Specifically my program now handles symbols that have a double suffix  (e.g. SLXX:LSE:GBP, IGUS:LSE:GBX) and symbols that are 2 characters long with a suffix (e.g. AI:PAR, OR:PAR).

And lastly, as part of the above online quotes re-work, I have begun the effort to include currency exchange rates as part of the online quote update.  Look for that soon in version 2.1.  If you are interested in the feature, I’ll be looking for some beta testers in the near future.  Send me an email if you’re interested in participating in the testing.