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Finding Google’s Pre-Split Price History Under Its Other Share Class

Article Quant Q&A · Author: Jacob Amos
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Summary

The document addresses an apparent gap in Yahoo Finance’s historical prices for Google around a stock split. The response explains that the company’s shares were divided into two classes and points readers seeking the older price series toward the other share-class ticker, GOOGL. This offers a simple diagnostic for distinguishing a missing data series from a corporate-action adjustment issue.

The exchange is brief and does not explain how the vendor organizes historical records, whether prices are adjusted for the split, or how to reconcile the two share classes in a backtest. It provides no comparison with alternative data sources and no broader method for handling corporate actions. Researchers using price histories should therefore confirm that the selected ticker represents the intended share class and check the data’s adjustment conventions before treating the series as continuous.

Key ideas

  • A corporate split into multiple share classes can make historical prices appear to be missing under one ticker.
  • The document identifies GOOGL as the ticker for the historical series the questioner was seeking.
  • Before backtesting, verify both the share class and the provider’s corporate-action adjustment conventions.
  • The answer does not establish whether the data vendor’s full historical record or adjustments are complete.

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EquitiesBacktesting
Full text
# Google historical prices on Yahoo Finance before split?


# Google historical prices on Yahoo Finance before split?












I recently noticed that the price history for Google (GOOG) on Yahoo Finance only goes back to when the stock split. For a while I thought they just hadn't gotten around to adjusting the close prices for the split, but it still hasn't been "fixed".

Just wondering if this is normal for Yahoo Finance when a stock splits or not? If so, when might the historical price data from before the split to come back? I use Yahoo data for some of my backtesting, and while I don't necessarily need the Google data, it would be nice to have the entire price history back up and running for purposes of data purity and completeness, so that if I run a backtest on the S&P 500, I don't have holes like that.

If this just normal and temporary, that's fine, but if not I'd like to know in case I should invest some time in finding and writing web scraping algos for another source for daily stock data.

## Answer by experquisite (score 4, accepted)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/11121

The stock was split into two share classes, the series that you might be looking for is under the ticker GOOGL.

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.