Is a stock's trade size history publicly available?
That is called a 'volume chart'. There are many interactive charts available for the purpose. Here is clear example.  (just for demonstration but this is for India only) 1) Yahoo Finance 2) Google Finance 3) And many more Usually, the stock volume density is presented together (below it) with normal price vs time chart. Note: There is a friendly site about topics like this. Quant.stackexchange.com. Think of checking it out. You can buy the data and process it on your own.  http://www.nyxdata.com/Data-Products/Daily-TAQ "My Broker and probably many Brokers provide this information in a table format under ""Course of Sale"". It provides the time, price and volume of each trade on that day. You could also view this data on a chart in some charting programs. Just set the interval to ""Tick by Tick"" and look at the volume. ""Tick by Tick"" will basically place a mark for every trade that is taken and then the volume will tell you the size of that trade."
"Though you're looking to repeat this review with multiple securities and events at different times, I've taken liberty in assuming you are not looking to conduct backtests with hundreds of events.  I've answered below assuming it's an ad hoc review for a single event pertaining to one security. Had the event occurred more recently, your full-service broker could often get it for you for free.  Even some discount brokers will offer it so.  If the stock and its options were actively traded, you can request ""time and sales,"" or ""TNS,"" data for the dates you have in mind.  If not active, then request ""time and quotes,"" or ""TNQ"" data. If the event happened long ago, as seems to be the case, then your choices become much more limited and possibly costly.  Below are some suggestions: Wall Street Journal and Investors' Business Daily print copies have daily stock options trading data.  They are best for trading data on actively traded options.  Since the event sounds like it was a major one for the company, it may have been actively traded that day and hence reported in the papers' listings.  Some of the print pages have been digitized; otherwise you'll need to review the archived printed copies. Bloomberg has these data and access to them will depend on whether the account you use has that particular subscription.  I've used it to get detailed equity trading data on defunct and delisted companies on specific dates and times and for and futures trading data.  If you don't have personal access to Bloomberg, as many do not, you can try to request access from a public, commercial or business school library. The stock options exchanges sell their data; some strictly to resellers and others to anyone willing to pay.  If you know which exchange(s) the options traded on, you can contact the exchange's market data services department and request TNS and / or TNQ data and a list of resellers, as the resellers may be cheaper for single queries." I dont know if this data is available for the 1980s, but this response to an old question of mine discusses how you can pull stock related information from google or yahoo finance over a certain period of time. You could do this in excel or google spreadsheet and see if you could get the data you're looking for.  Quote from old post: Google Docs spreadsheets have a   function for filling in stock and fund   prices. You can use that data to graph (fund1   / fund2) over some time period. "Yes.  I heard back from a couple brokerages that gave detailed responses. Specifically: In a Margin account, there are no SEC trade settlement rules, which means there is no risk of any free ride violations. The SEC has a FAQ page on free-riding, which states that it applies specifically to cash accounts. This led me to dig up the text on Regulation T which gives the ""free-riding"" rule in §220.8(c), which is titled ""90 day freeze"". §220.8 is the section on cash accounts. Nothing in the sections on margin accounts mentions such a settlement restriction. From the Wikipedia page on Free Riding, the margin agreement implicitly covers settlement. ""Buying Power"" doesn't seem to be a Regulation T thing, but it's something that the brokerages that I've seen use to state how much purchasing power a client has. Given the response from the brokerage, above, and my reading of Regulation T and the relevant Wikipedia page, proceeds from the sale of any security in a margin account are available immediately for reinvestment. Settlement is covered implicitly by margin; i.e. it doesn't detract from buying power. Additionally, I have personally been making these types of trades over the last year. In a sub-$25K margin account, proceeds are immediately available. The only thing I still have to look out for is running into the day-trading rules." Is there any precedent for companies trading on their own insider information for the benefit of stockholders?  Said another way, if a company were to enter a new market where they were very confident of their ability to steamroll a public competitor, could they use a wholly-owned special-purpose investment vehicle to short that competitor in order to juice the benefit of that move? Trading data can be had cheaply from:  http://eoddata.com/products/historicaldata.aspx  The SEC will give you machine readable financial statements for American companies for free, but that only goes back 3 or 4 years.  Beyond that, you will have to pay for a rather expensive service like CapitalIQ or CRSP or whatever.  Note that you will need considerable programming knowledge to pull this off. Thanks for your reply. I’m not familiar with the term “Held-For-Trading Security”. My securities are generally held as collateral against my shorts. To clarify, I am just trying to track the “money in” and “money out” entries in my account for the shorts I write. The transaction is relatively straight forward, except there is a ton of information attached! In simple terms, for the ticker CSR and short contract CSRUQ8, the relevant entries look something like this: There are no entries for expiries. I need to ensure that funds are available for future margin calls and assignments. The sale side using covered calls is as involved. "I think for this a picture is worth a thousand words.  This is a ""depth chart"" that I pulled from google images, specifically because it doesn't name any security.  On the left you have all of the ""bids"" to buy this security, on the right you have the ""asks"" to sell the security.  In the middle you have the bid/ask spread, this is the space between the highest bid and the lowest ask.  As you can see you are free to place you order to the market to buy for 232, and someone else is free to place their order to the market to sell for 234.  When the bid and the ask match there's a transaction for the maximum number of available shares.  Alternatively, someone can place a market order to buy or sell and they'll just take the current market price. Retail investors don't really get access to this kind of chart from their brokers because for the most part the information isn't terribly relevant at the retail level." Yahoo Finance's Historical Prices section allows you to look up  daily historical quotes for any given stock symbol, you don't have to hit a library for this information. Your can choose a desired time frame for your query, and the dataset will include High/Low/Close/Volume numbers. You can then download a CSV version of this report and perform additional analysis in a spreadsheet of your choice. Below is Twitter report from IPO through yesterday: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=TWTR&a=10&b=7&c=2013&d=08&e=23&f=2014&g=d I know of no free source for 10 years historical data on a large set of companies.  Now, if it's just a single company or small number that interest you, contact Investor Relations at the company(ies) in question; they may be willing to send you the data for free. "Stock recommendations and price history are an unwise way to invest. People that recommend stocks are usually compensation for recommending it. They are paid directly by third parties, that can be paid in shares, they can simply own the stock themselves and if the stock goes up they can sell it to new investors at a higher price (or even a lower price, they may not actually care) Price history does not tell you a complete picture, what kind of price history are you even looking at: ""this stock went up, let me buy now at the very top and hope it goes higher, am I too late"" ""this stock went down let me avoid it"" if you don't know why, what, who, when, assets, debt, etc, you shouldn't be buying the stock." I assume you're after a price time series and not a list of S&P 500 constituents?  Yahoo Finance is always a reasonable starting point. Code you're after is ^GSPC: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/history?p=^GSPC  There's a download data button on the right side. When Hewlett Packard split they changed their name to HP Inc. and spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a new corporation. This means HP Inc. has the same stock history and ticker (HPQ) as Hewlett Packard did so that's the one you want to search for. As you noticed this also means it's impossible to search for old Hewlett Packard's stock performance alone. One free service that seems to show the unadjusted historical stock price of HPQ is Google finance: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AHPQ I haven't seen one of these in quite some time. Back in the 1970s, maybe the 1980s, stock brokers would occasionally send their retail clients a complimentary copy once in a while. Also, I remember the local newspaper would offer a year-end edition for a few dollars (maybe $3) and that edition would include the newspaper company's name on the cover. They were very handy little guides measuring 5 1/2 x 8 (horizontal) with one line devoted to each company. They listed hundreds of publicly traded companies and had basic info on each company. As you stated, for further info you needed to go to the library and follow-up with the big S&P and/or Moody's manuals. That was long before the internet made such info available at the click of a button on a home computer! "This functionality is widely available, not only on brokerage sites, but also financial management and even financial information sites.  For instance, two of the latter are Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.  If you are logged in, they let you create ""portfolios"" listing your stocks and, optionally, the size of your holdings in that stock (which you don't need if you are just ""watching"" a stock).  Then you can visit the site at any time and see the current valuations." "Are you working for a company that offers a Dependent Care Account? You may be able to withhold up to $5000/yr pre tax for care for you child.  If you cover more than half her expenses, she is your dependent. You can't ""double dip."" If she is your dependent, she cannot be the care provider for purposes of the DCAS, see Pub 503  top of p7 ""Payments to Relatives or Dependents."" How do you think a business would change your situation? The DCA is a small tax break, if you have no business now, this break isn't something that should drive this."