Ruby: Stock project – Build your own Stock Database

With the state of economy taking up so much of the news, the stock market is taking center stage like I have never seen before. 1999 and 2000 were about how everything was going up and there was no end in site. Now 8 years later everything is going down and we don’t know where the bottom might be. It’s kind of funny to see how much has changed in only the past six months. We have gone from a pretty much status quo market to one of the most turbulent markets in over 30 years.

With all of the focus on the credit crisis, I’ve been watching a lot of CNBC in the evening. This is not for investing advice, just to see what the financial pundits are saying about the current financial events. So I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Money, Kudlow & Company, and Fast Money over the past few months.

The three shows are good shows to watch, just don’t act on the recommendations immediately. Listen, learn how to filter and learn how people make decisions. I could go into more detail about these shows, but that would be for a different post.

This brings me to the real reason for this post. In all of the shows, they, the hosts, are always referencing research. I researched this and found that this is this. They never go into the details of how they researched, the criteria used, etc. These TV hosts only show you the selections and not how they came to their selections.

A lot of free information services exist out on the Internet for stocks. There are lots of free development tools like Ruby and databases like PostgreSQL. This is going to be an exercise on how to build your own stock picking database.

What you will need for this project are the following:

Ruby
Ruby postgres gem
PostgreSQL data base
Internet Connection

If something is missing I’ll update this post with new information. I’ve installed several gems over the past couple of months. At this point I’m not going to install rails or use rails. I will use Rails, when I get to reporting and making things available to other people.

This will be the list of topics in the order they are created.

1. Install Ruby and Postgres

2. Source Data

3.