Yahoo Adjusted Historical Prices

[flan10]

Hi Mark - Yahoo claims that the adjusted close price is adjusted for dividends and splits (no mention is made of capital gains distributions). Reviewing the price data for PRENX for the last six months on the Yahoo website shows the close and adj close prices to be identical, despite a dividend distribution on 12/27 and a large capital gains distribution on 12/18. Given that unadjusted historical price data produces misleading moving average data, is it possible to manually adjust a data file for distributions?

Thanks - Mike F.

[Mark]

Hi Mike,

The data is back adjusted, prior to the dates of the distributions. Yahoo doesn't have the December distribution in their database yet, so that would be consistent with the prices not being adjusted yet. You can see this by looking at the "Historical Prices" link for the quote, and choosing to only display dividends. For example:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=PRENX&a ... f=2014&g=v

You typically only want to use "adjusted" prices for something you don't own, and aren't automatically recording your own/real distributions. You can use either the real historical prices, plus distributions, or you could use adjusted prices, and do not record distributions. If you want to do a mix until Yahoo gets this distribution in their database, you could record the December distribution, in conjunction with the otherwise adjusted prices.