Price Retrieve for Canadian Equity Options

[Masood F]

Hi Mark,

I hold Canadian Equity Options in my portfolio. How do I retrieve prices for these equity options? I know that Yahoo doesn't quote prices for Canadian options. Can you kindly guide me on which server to use to retrieve prices for Canadian options?

Many thanks.
Masood

[Mark]

Hi Masood,

I would have guessed Yahoo, I wasn't aware they didn't have Canadian stock options. I don't know which server does. My suggestion would be to use your browser, and visit our quote servers to see if any of them offer these quotes. Links to all the quote servers are listed here:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/intrtv.html

[Masood F]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply. I checked the list of quote servers that you linked in your reply above, but none of them offer quotes for Canadian equity options. While Canada Stockwatch can quote for Canadian options, however when I tried to access a quote for Canadian option the website informed me that's a "Member's Only" area to which I don't have access.

I know for certain that the Toronto Stock Exchange website (tmx.com) offers excellent stock option quotes, both for Canadian and US stocks and options. Is it possible for you to arrange for Fund Manager to be able to retrieve prices from that website? I believe their quotes are provided by QuoteMedia.

It would be really helpful and greatly appreciated if you can have the TMX site as one of the quote servers for FM, since this site provides quotes for both stocks and options of Canadian and US companies.

Many thanks.
Masood

[Mark]

Hi Masood,

Thanks for the quote server suggestion. I took a look at that site. I do see it offering option quotes, in addition to many others. Unfortunately, you can't look up all the different quotes using the same URL, and get the reply in a consistent format. This means we would need separate quote server definitions for each type of quote you wanted to retrieve, like:

TMX-Options
TMX-Stocks
etc...

It isn't impossible, but it makes it less desirable from a quote server point of view. It would be still beneficial in terms of offering Canadian option quotes, since they're not apparently available on any of our other servers now. We can consider this.

[Masood F]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your response. Given that you must have more than a handful of Canadians who use Fund Manager, it would be terrific if you could include the TMX quote servers specifically for Canadian stocks and options.

Would it be possible for you to give a timeline on when you would include TMX's quote servers in Fund Manager? Also, when you send out the email to registered users that details the new features in each iteration of Fund Manager, would you kindly specify inclusion of TMX's quote servers in FM -- that would be my cue to upgrade.

Many thanks and cheers!

Masood

[Mark]

Hi Masood,

There are currently already multiple servers for Canadian stocks, so the real benefit here would be for Canadian options. Sorry, I cannot give a timeline for if/when this will be added. There are many features we consider when deciding where to focus our resources. If it were added, it would be included in the revision history we update whenever a new version comes out. There is a link to this revision history in the email we send out. You can see it here:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/modlist.html