How can I display a chart showing historical Price/Earnings Ratios?

Questions
,
1

I am trying to use:

DateListPlot[FinancialData["GE", "Jan. 1, 2006","PERatio"]]

but it’s not working.
Any ideas?

2

Hi Claudio,
I have the same problem with “GE”. If you follow the Wolfram Financial Plattform: Quick Start, by Michael Kelly & Samuel Chen (check below the first lines), you get "Missing[“NotAvailable”], for “GE”. For all other companies it is fine. So the problem must be in in NYSE and not in Mathematca.

stocks = {“MSFT”, “AAPL”, “GOOG”, “GS”, “XOM”, “GE”};
properties = {“Symbol”, “Name”, “Price”, “PERatio”, “MarketCap”}
data = Table[FinancialData[s, p], {s, stocks}, {p, properties}]
stocktable =
Style[TableForm[data,
TableHeadings → {None,
Style[#, Bold] & /@ {“Ticker Symbol”, “Name”, “Current Price”,
“P/E Ratio”, “Market Cap”}}], FontFamily → “Verdana”, 14]

3

  1. The syntax is not correct. You may have noticed that FinancialData gives an error. That is because the date comes last:

    FinancialData[“GE”, “PERatio”, “Jan. 1, 2006”]

  2. FinancialData returns Missing, meaning that no data exists for the PE ratio from that time.

  3. You can sometimes get FinancialData from Wolfram|Alpha. See here for a tutorial: Wolfram Support Quick Answers: How do I access computable data through Wolfram|Alpha?

  4. Sometimes, you just can’t get the financial data you want from free sources. This is why people pay for a bloomberg or reuters subscription.

4

Hi Sean,
Thanks for the reply. My point was similar to yours (4). Your point (2) is not correct, as far as GE is concerned. According to Yahoo, see the link below, PE ratio for GE have existed for many decades.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GE+Interactive#{“range”:“max”,“allowChartStacking”:true}

5

Sorry. More accurately I meant that Yahoo, the provider of the free data isn’t providing that data. They still sometimes provide data on their website that they won’t provide through their services. Data licensing issues are complicated and annoying.

6

Thank you Sean.

I tried this, but it says data not available:
WolframAlpha[“Microsoft pe ratios 2011”]

Any other ideas before I look for an API somewhere else?

7

In the past I’ve had success with Quandl. There is a Mathematica package online for working with it, although it’s fairly easy to use without it as well.