Dow Jones Industrial Average

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a well known indicator of the overall health of the economy calculated using the current value of a variety of stocks along with a periodically adjusted divisor. The opening value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is used as an entropy source in the Geohashing algorithm.

If you're programming a geohashing calculator, mapping service or other implementation, you'll need a source for the current and historic DJIA value. This page lists known sources and ways to access them and access restrictions.

The Internet

Conventions

In the following descriptions, tokens will be used in URLs to represent values of the date as specified by the strftime() function found in many languages. Specifically:

• %Y is the year (e.g. 1990)
• %m is the two digit month number (e.g. 03)
• %d is the two digit day number (e.g. 14)

irc.peeron.com

irc.peeron.com
Date Range:	1928/10/01 - present
Update Source:	finance.google.com, dates before 1970 from yahoo.com
Update Frequency:	weekdays, between 09:00 and 10:00 ET - as soon as the data is available on google. Usually up by 09:35 ET
Server Location:	Reston, Virginia, USA
Contact:	Zigdon

The source can be accessed at:

http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/data/%Y/%m/%d

• This is used by the reference implementation.
• Access Restrictions: There are no technical restrictions in place, but please let User:Zigdon know if you're about to use it heavily.

sctree-it.sytes.net:50324

sctree-it.sytes.net:50324
Date Range:	1970-01-02 - present
Update Source:	finance.google.com
Update Frequency:	weekdays, at 09:35 ET
Server Location:	Stamford, CT, USA
Contact:	Gandazgul

The source can be accessed at:

http://sctree-it.sytes.net:50324/geohash/dow.php?yy=%Y&mm=%m&dd=%d

• There is an additional parameter: &dbg=true, that will print the relevant variables on each step of the process. This page used by my implementation.
• Access Restrictions: There are no technical restrictions in place, but please let me (User:Gandazgul) know if you're planning to use it heavily.

finance.yahoo.com

finance.yahoo.com
Date Range:	1928-10-01 - present
Update Source:	finance.yahoo.com
Update Frequency:	daily
Server Location:	Probably San Jose, CA
Contact:	support@yahoo.com

The source can be accessed at:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=%5EDJI&a=09&b=1&c=1928&d=%m&e=%d&f=%Y&g=d&ignore=.csv

• comma-delimited file download with Date,Open,High,Low,Close,Volume,Adjusted Close
• Access Restrictions: none

During the trading day, the current opening can be accessed at

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=%5eDJI&f=o

A shorter alias for this is xrl.us/djiopen. At the end of the trading day, this figure will be added to the table above along with the high/low/close etc.

Both resources use CRLF line endings, so if you are on Unix pipe this one through col(1) before trying to take the MD5, or set IFS appropriately.

xkcd.nucleardog.com

xkcd.nucleardog.com
Date Range:	1970-01-02 - present
Update Source:	finance.google.com
Update Frequency:	hourly
Server Location:	Texas, USA
Contact:	NuclearDog

The source can be accessed at:

http://xkcd.nucleardog.com/getdow.php?year=%Y&month=%m&day=%d

• Leading zeros are not significant in year, month and day values. Should return values in exactly the same way as the reference (irc.peeron.com) source. Has a check script run periodically which compares its values to irc.peeron.com's. If they fall out of sync for some reason (all issues should be resolved) it will begin transparently retrieving all values from irc.peeron.com so it should be completely reliable as far as value returned.
• Access Restrictions: Free for anyone to use up to a reasonable number of requests. If you plan on making upwards of 10k or 20k requests a day, please consult with me first.

Television

In areas without (instant) internet access, you need to know the current DJIA to calculate today's coordinates manually. That probably means by using a cellphone or notebook with an offline calculator.

Europe

Channel N24s teletextpage 301 shows the DJIA opening value:

SMS

Text "DJIA [date]" to +41764064890, eg:

djia 20091110

A few seconds later you should get the following message back:

DJIA opening value for 2009-11-10 is 10223.01

Not case-sensitive, so "Djia", "djia" etc. are all fine. The script is also flexible on the date format as long as it's in the Y-m-d order.

As for other sources, you always get the relevant opening value, ie if the given date is on a week-end or DOW holiday, you get the latest opening value before that date.

See also Geohashing SMS service; suggestions, comments and other feedback to User:Crox