MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

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schmoglehead
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Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:39 am

MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by schmoglehead »

About two weeks ago, MSN stock quotes (msnsq.exe) stopped working.
This is a great Excel add-in that with one click allows you to update all of your holdings. Cells in Excel can be conditionally formatted so that the background color changes when you reach your 25/5 rule for rebalancing. It has worked like a charm for the past six years.
There is one good thread on this: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/offi ... 2342884499
Has anyone found a fix?
Thanks,
Schmoglehead
blueridge
Posts: 66
Joined: Tue Jun 25, 2013 3:46 pm

Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by blueridge »

I am seeing the same thing. Used it for years, and now it's hit or miss. I have noticed that whereas a few days ago it was failing to get about 3/4 of my quotes, now it is failing to get about 1/5 of them. So it's improving. Hopefully they'll have it working in a day or two.

Oh, just read your link. Did you try using "USA" instead of "US"? I can't try it right now, but maybe it will improve the results?
dbr
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by dbr »

blueridge wrote:I am seeing the same thing. Used it for years, and now it's hit or miss. I have noticed that whereas a few days ago it was failing to get about 3/4 of my quotes, now it is failing to get about 1/5 of them. So it's improving. Hopefully they'll have it working in a day or two.

Oh, just read your link. Did you try using "USA" instead of "US"? I can't try it right now, but maybe it will improve the results?
My problems with this add-in were corrected by this change. Since then everything seems normal.
blueridge
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by blueridge »

dbr wrote:My problems with this add-in were corrected by this change. Since then everything seems normal.
Was just able to try it - works for me too.
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schmoglehead
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by schmoglehead »

I changed US to USA and it worked for some quotes and later stopped working.
I also changed the non-working quotes to NYSE and that worked also but with some quotes later stopped working.
Same behavior on two computers.
Is MSNSQ.EXE working properly for anyone over time? I get it to work temporarily.
chaika
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by chaika »

Started manually adding the A to "US" and realized there is such thing as Global Replace. :oops:

That fixed the problem for the funds and stock. But VMMXX money market still does not work. It gives me #N/A for the cell
=MSNStockQuote($B11,"Company Name","USA") referencing VMMXX.
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schmoglehead
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by schmoglehead »

Some stocks always update normally.
Others intermittantly work. Sometimes any of the following: US, USA and NYSE work sometimes none of these work.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this!
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schmoglehead
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by schmoglehead »

Here is a good thread regarding alternatives.
http://financetrain.com/topic/alternati ... -in-excel/

It took a couple hours but I recreated my Excel financial sheet in Google Docs using Google spreadsheet with the GoogleFinance() functions http://seekingalpha.com/article/568641- ... watch-list

A nice example of what you can do with this Google solution is found https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... 1SFE#gid=3

I sum our investments by asset allocation and use conditional formatting to flag allocation values that are past the 25/5 rule tolerances. So, when the sheet opens and updates, I know immediately if I need to rebalance. This was relatively easy in Google spreadsheet. I essentially reused all my Excel formulas.

Thanks Google!!

Schmoglehead
Alan S.
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by Alan S. »

Sounds like about the same time the MSN Portfolio Tracker stopped providing support for manual cash balance (MM Funds) balances.
blueridge
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Joined: Tue Jun 25, 2013 3:46 pm

Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by blueridge »

schmoglehead wrote:Here is a good thread regarding alternatives.
http://financetrain.com/topic/alternati ... -in-excel/
meh, that thread read like someone with an agenda, which always makes me tune out fast. That being said, there is one nugget in there, which works great for Excel 2010 or later...
http://beforeitsnews.com/financial-mark ... 18708.html

For earlier versions of Excel, msnsq also works well (for me anyway) if I change "US" to "USA" as mentioned earlier.
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serbeer
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by serbeer »

After MSN plug in I've been using for the past 6 years stopped working a couple of weeks ago, I just modified all of my spreadsheets today to use this plug in instead:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/smf_addin/
It was pretty easy to convert: after install I simply started using, for example,
=RCHGetYahooQuotes(A1,"l1",,NOW())
instead of
=MSNStockQuote.Functions.MSNStockQuote(A1,"Last Price","USA")
to get quote for ticker in A1 cell (actually, optimized for much better performance using array functions functionality as described here http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/s ... essage/124 to get quotes for the whole list of tickers I use).
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Peculiar_Investor
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Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

There is a parallel discussion of this issue starting with http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtop ... 4#p1728094. From my experiences it seems to be an intermittent problem which I'm speculating relates to their underlying data feed and conversion process. IIRC MSN changed their data feed provider recently.

I've got an Excel spreadsheet that automatically pulls quotes from MSN periodically and I've found that intermittently no result is returned and then on the next refresh all is good again. Since I use the spreadsheet for informational purposes only, waiting for the next refresh is only a minor irritant rather than a major enough problem for me to consider revamping the spreadsheet to use another data source.
Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet. – Scott Adams
Naresh
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Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 9:22 pm

Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by Naresh »

For me variation of USA or US worked for few symbols, but leaving that blank with "" worked for all the symbols.

=MSNStockQuote.Functions.MSNStockQuote(A1,"Last Price","")

goodluck!!
bapin93
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Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2014 1:50 am

Re: MSN Stock Quotes is not working.

Post by bapin93 »

Hey, a similar problem seems to have popped up recently and I had a hard time finding a fix. I spent some time working on this work around and though I would share it with anyone having the same problem. I made a short tutorial video explaining how to automatically download data from yahoo and import it into excel. Here is the link: http://youtu.be/MtEio4-B31E
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