DATABASE MAINTENANCE

Premium Data maintains your US database regularly in order for you to have an accurate record of currently trading securities.  Maintenance is performed on a daily basis.

The following actions are performed as part of daily database maintenance:

• Equity prices are adjusted for changes to a company's capital base (such as share splits, reverse splits/consolidations, capital restructures, capital returns, demergers, stock dividends)
  
• De-listed securities and associated trading instruments are moved from the main database into a "Recently De-listed Securities" folder (from where you may delete them at your leisure)
  
• Securities that have undergone a name or code change are refreshed to reflect the new name or code.
  
• New securities that have been added to the database are assigned their full names.
   
• Securities that have changed their exchange listing (eg. from NASDAQ to NYSE, or NASDAQ to OTC and back) are automatically transferred with full trading history intact.

WARNING:  Most free sources of data do not perform any maintenance -  they simply provide flat ASCII or CSV text files each day with no corporate action information.

Why is this important?

If you are a treating the market as a professional trader would, you need to have an up-to-date and consistent database.  You want to spent your time analysing stocks not processing routine, mundane corporate actions.

Can't I just use free data and do the maintenance myself?

We wish you luck if you do.    We wouldn't want to do these manually each day/week/month and highly recommend you use a service like Premium Data to do all this hard work for you. Why spend all your time maintaining your database when you should be looking for trading opportunities? Here is a report of the amount of corporate actions that we process each year:

Why is it important to have OTC stocks in my database?

Many companies that temporarily fail listing rules on the other exchanges (AMEX, NASDAQ, NYSE) often sit in the OTC-BB market until they can rectify the issue.  If you do not maintain an OTC-BB history, when this stock subsequently relists on a major exchange you will be without any trading history. OTC stocks are still quite tradeable.