Conflicting Barclays historical share price data between Google/Halifax.

vacheron

Little bit of help here please:

I usually buy and sell shares using the Halifax online dealing service and find their market data very useful. However, while tidying up my trades for this year I noticed in their their Barclays (BARC) data they show a 1 year high here of 308.39 but I knew (and my trade history shows) that I sold Barclays shares on the 19th of July at 319.51.

It finally occurred to me that the price must have been retrospectively amended to reflect the recent Barclays rights issue, however Google charts do not show this adjustment and show a 52 week high of 338.20.

Neither of the charts seem to show any indication that they have / have not been adjusted, so how do other investors on here know which data to trust, and is it a Google/Halifax wide global decision or may the adjustment be applied/not applied for different companies on each site? :huh:

grizzly1911

vacheron wrote: »

Little bit of help here please:

I usually buy and sell shares using the Halifax online dealing service and find their market data very useful. However, while tidying up my trades for this year I noticed in their their Barclays (BARC) data they show a 1 year high here of 308.39 but I knew (and my trade history shows) that I sold Barclays shares on the 19th of July at 319.51.

It finally occurred to me that the price must have been retrospectively amended to reflect the recent Barclays rights issue, however Google charts do not show this adjustment and show a 52 week high of 338.20.

Neither of the charts seem to show any indication that they have / have not been adjusted, so how do other investors on here know which data to trust, and is it a Google/Halifax wide global decision or may the adjustment be applied/not applied for different companies on each site? :huh:

I would have thought thy would have a common source but Yahoo are showing 333.85 on their chart and 338.20 on their data.
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=BARC.L#symbol=barc.l;range=1y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

Masomnia

Could one be based on closing prices and another on intra-day prices?

vacheron

You would hope that the only certainty in share dealing would be the consistency of the historical data , but I guess not!

I've just checked the same two sites using Prudential (PRU) and see the same issue

Halifax Data: 52 week high 1,232.00p
Google Data: 52 week high 1,270.00p

Not as huge as the >10% discrepancy seen with Barclays, but it seems to disprove my "rights issue" explanation. :huh:

John1993_2

Looking on Bloomberg (which is about as good as it gets for this sort of data), the high closing price was indeed 308.392, on 22nd May.

It also shows an intra-day high of 312.4106, which happened at 14:04 on that same day, so you definitely would have been doing well to sell above that any time recently.

The range on the 19th of July was 290.5178 to 297.8616. The average price was 295.3, which is 92.4% of the price at which you dealt. This iis pretty close to the price adjustment factor of 0.921388 which was applied after the rights issue.

So, to answer your actual question, you can trust all the data, it seems, you just have to understand what it is telling you, and this is that the current high is for the current shares, after the rights issue. The shares which you sold before were not the same thing, and so were worth more.

To answer your other query, London shares of Prudential had their highest close at 1232.00 on the 12th August. They traded 1270.00 intra-day on the 13th August 2013.

vacheron

Thanks John.

So it appears that we have established that:

The Halifax data uses the day closing price and has retrospectively factored the rights issue effect into its historical figures to reflect the company value over time rather than showing the actual share price on the day in question.

The Google data appears to record the peak, intra-day value and also does not amend the historical data to reflect the rights issue.

Therefore the Google data shows a non-recovering drop in September when the Halifax data does not.
Google leaves it to the reader to understand this drop is due to mitigating circumstances whereas the Halifax data attempts to do this for them.
:beer: