Getbhavcopy: Free NSE and BSE data downloader

While most of you would be using Getbhavcopy as a daily stock market data downloader, it is a powerful historical stock data downloader too. There would be many users who would like to download bulk data i.e. about 3 to 6 months of historical stock data at one time and want to import it into your technical analysis software.

Downloading bulk data using Getbhavcopy is not a big deal because you can set the date range for which you want to download stock data and Getbhavcopy will download the data in one stretch i.e. without requiring your input.

But the issue arises when you need to import this data into your technical analysis software. Imagine importing daily EOD data for about 100 days into your technical analysis software. I have a tip for you where you can import the entire bulk of data into your technical analysis software in a single go.

I will try to explain using Metastock as the technical analysis software, but I believe the steps are vaild for any technical analysis software.

As an example lets consider you want to download data from 01-Jul-2008 to 15-Jan-2009.

Download the data

• Start Getbhavcopy.
• Uncheck the 'Enable output header' checkbox for the exchange (i.e NSE or BSE) for which you are downloading data. If you are downloading data for both exchanges then uncheck for both.
• Save these Getbhavcopy Options.
• Download the data using Getbhavcopy.

So now the data will be downloaded in the download directories.

Setup the data files for merge.

• Create two directories C:\NSETEMP and C:\BSETEMP
• Copy the files 2008-07-01-NSE-EQ.txt to 2009-01-15-NSE-EQ.txt from your NSE download directory to the C:\NSETEMP directory.
• Copy the files 2008-07-01-BSE-EQ.txt to 2009-01-15-BSE-EQ.txt from your BSE download directory to the C:\BSETEMP directory.
• Now in your C:\BSETEMP directory open the data file for the first day in your date range (i.e.2008-07-01-BSE-EQ.txt in our example) in Notepad and add the following line as the first line in that file and save it.

<ticker>, <date>, <open>, <high>, <low>, <close>, <vol>, <o/i>

Merge the files

• Now start the command prompt. You can do so from Start >> Run, type cmd and press enter.
• Change the directory to the C:\NSETEMP directory. Now you should be in the NSETEMP directory.
• Enter command

copy *.txt NSE.txt

This copy command creates a single file with the data of all the txt files you copied in the C:\NSETEMP directory.

Similarly change to the BSETEMP directory and do the same to generate the BSE.txt file.

Now you can follow the instructions in the document 'Importing Getbhavcopy data into Metastock' to import the combined NSE.txt and BSE.txt file into Metastock, but make sure you set the proper date range while importing the data.