TSX Debenture Sheet Update

A few days ago, TSX Money has changed their website interface (in my opinion the change is awful for desktop users compared to the previous version). Before it used to be my go-to to get a quick quotation or the most recent news, but now everything is so spaced out and shows a lot more irrelevant information that I’m looking for alternatives. Why do providers always mess up a good thing? You get what you pay for I guess!

The best example of non-changing interfaces with incremental improvement are sites like Craigslist or Secinfo. They know major interface changes turn off users.

In regards to the TSX Debenture sheet I maintained, it broke the quote retrieval system I was using. Previously, the code to recover near real-time quotes was kindly provided by a user of the sheet which I was more than happy to implement (it involved importing the data from the TMX website). My first attempt to this weekend to re-establish this (realize that my mad hacking skills are about 20 years out of date) consumed a couple hours of time with little headway. I’m guessing one of you out there is smart enough to give me a proper =importxml(…) routine that will magically work.

Thank you.

(Update: A very, very, very intelligent person from Japan (you know who you are…) was kind enough to render assistance on this. Things look to be operational again, but we’ll find out when the market opens again on Tuesday!)

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You could use Yahoo Finance (the only thing with them is their stock symbols are weird – AFN-DBF.TO)

=INDEX(IMPORTXML(“https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/AFN-DBF.TO”,“(//div[@id=’quote-header-info’]/div[last()]/div[1]//span)[1]”),1)

Its too bad debentures weren’t on Google Finance, then it would be dead simple.

Thanks for the partial fix Sacha.
Yahoo only tracks about 40% of debentures correctly….mostly the newer stuff.

what does this mean “black box”? GetLastPrice is magic?

Thanks for your work on this. Very helpful!

Sacha, any chance you could ask helper if you can post the script for getting the live price off the new tmx website? I know it would help many of us who were using the old formulas. Thanks.

“but now everything is so spaced out and shows a lot more irrelevant information that I’m looking for alternatives.”

Yes the new TMX site takes up an incredible amount or real estate….what is everyone using now as an alternative?

I’ve essentially replaced TMX by using TIKR, Koyfin, and simply googling “XXXX stock price”. If I need a real time quote I go through TD, which is a bit of a pain, but in general the 15 minute delayed quotes on Koyfin and Google work fine.

Thanks Tyler….the nice thing about TMX was no need to sign in or be a member…TIKR appears to need an invite to even join. I’m using TD more and more…and I hate TD.

That link in my comment should work as an invitation. Once you have an account you still need to sign in, but it’s one click if you do the whole “remember me”. But I get what you’re saying and I don’t have a solution.

sorry for the delay….thanks for the invite Tyler. I just checked it out, can’t seem to find dividend info?

To tell you the truth I’ve never looked for dividend info on TIKR. The only dividend info seems to be from the cash flow statement on the financials tab, which isn’t the most helpful. It has everything else you’d be looking for – earnings per share, FFO per share, free cash flow per share, etc – to calculate payout ratios or anything like that, but another site would be required for the actual dividend per share, yield, etc.