Archive for the ‘stocks’ Category

rQuote – Ruby on Rails Stock Quote Plugin

Friday, August 29th, 2008

I merged some stock quoting stuff I had into a Rails plugin today. If you’d like to be able to simply grab real time stock quotes in your Rails app, this will do the job. Pretty much any stock symbol will work and you can enter as many as you’d like, you’ll get a hash array of hashes containing each symbol’s current value, change since open, and volume.

http://github.com/johnyerhot/rquote/tree/master

Rquote
======

Gets realtime stock quotes from Yahoo Finance. 

Its super simple to use.

Example
=======

quote = Rquote.new
quote.find("aapl", "msft") 

=> [{:change=>"-4.02", :price=>"169.72", :volume=>"16105013", :symbol=>"aapl"}, {:change=>"-0.42", :price=>"27.52",
:volume=>"27024456", :symbol=>"msft"}]

Copyright (c) 2008 John Yerhot, released under the MIT license

Posted in Geeky, Linux, Programming, Ruby, Ruby On Rails, stocks | 6 Comments »

The Markets

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Since I started my nice cushy “high paying” job, Jen and I have been putting quite a bit of money away (in preparation for the move and for a rainy day) and paying down our debt.  We’ve got some moola stored away in a ingdirect savings account thats collecting a nice 4.1% interest rate, but I’ve been toying with the idea of playing the stocks.

A couple of months ago I opened a dummy portfolio at money.cnn.com using their ‘live portfolio’ do hickey.  I’ve got next to zero experience with the markets.  Our 403(b) is invested in the Vangaurd S&P 500 Index fund(hey can’t argue with 11% historic returns), but thats about it.  My state pension I really have no control over.  Thats the extent of our investments.   So I opened that dummy account to see what I could do.

Well, the first two weeks were great.  Made about 10% with my mostly tech stock portfolio.  The last two weeks, I’ve lost all that 10% and then another 10.  So I’m down right now.  Kind of glad it is fake money at this point, but I think this summer, when I’m hoping the market bottoms out, I’ll be ready to actually drop a couple grand on a real portfolio and get some good stocks for cheap.

I must admit I’m learning a ton.  I’ve actually begun watching CNBC in the moring before work, bought Jim Cramer’s new book, and check the portfolio about 3-4 times a day.  Its fun if anything.

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Posted in money, stocks | 1 Comment »