Yahoo deleted my PCL history?

[Bruce]

Plum Creek Timber was absorbed by Weyerhaeuser this year. I had data on PCL from 1/1/01 until it was absorbed. Since PCL was one of my FM-tryout stocks, I had hand-entered technical signals that matched what I had used over the last 10+years. Now I don't have any of that.

As part of my investigation i find that Yahoo Finance doesn't recognize the PCL symbol anymore. (Google Finance does)

Possibly related tangent: Since I decided to go with FM last month, I spent the last few weeks entering many securities and transactions to FM (being a new user). When done, I asked for their historical data back to 1/1/01. While it was doing that, it occurred to me that it was downloading history for everything, including securities that already had history.

Is it possible that Fund Manager discarded my existing PCL data when Yahoo said there wasn't any?

A number of questions come to mind now regarding maintaining historical data ... could you explain how the download manager works and treats existing data? Or am I on the wrong path and my PCL data disappeared for some other reason?

Thanks. Happy New year.

[Mark]

Hi Bruce,

Retrieving prices will never delete existing data, but it will overwrite it with new data when available. So, if you had historical data, and then retrieve it later, the retrieved data will overwrite any prior recorded pricing if the historical server had data for those dates. I'm not sure how your historical pricing data would have been deleted. Maybe you closed the investment, or are looking at the wrong investment?

Fund Manager makes automatic backups. The preferences for this are at "Options / General Preferences... / Data". By default, it makes a backup every 3 days. If your pricing is really gone, you can see if you have a backup dated from a date before the problem happened. You can choose to restore only selected investments from a backup, you don't have to restore everything. Use "File / Restore..." and go pick a *.FMB file from an appropriate date, and try restoring your PCL investment. It is a good idea to use "File / Backup..." before experiment, so you can always get back to your current spot in case the restore doesn't have what you want.

[Bruce]

Apologies; I must be mis-remembering.

I'm old school computer science ... "save early, save often and under different names" so any time I do data entry to FM I make a backup immediately after. I have three backups after creating PCL. I'd bet a good scotch that I checked the historical data afterwards. But right now it only shows one price, and that's the cost-basis price. It draws that as a blue line horizontally across the graph window. Consistent in all three backups.

Changing the server for PCL to Google enabled retrieving the historical data. All is good now.

And now I know that when I set up a new security (or a new portfolio) that I should use the right mouse button so I can get historical data just for the new one(s).

Thanks for the help.