Month: October 2011

Download Nigerian Stock Exchange Historical Stock Price Dataset

Some months ago I was trying to do some data analysis on historical equity data with Geek Impressario, Femi Aluko, but we practically ran into brick walls: no data. There wasn’t any easy place to get daily prices in one single place.
I turned to a friend who had one but then due to some vague business secrecy, I was told to hug an electric pole (told in a nice way that I actually looked forward to that shocking experience).
So like what geeks are known for, our impresario sat down and cooked some codes, helped with a generous dose of caffeine and bush meat and presto, a scrapper was born to scour the web for fragments and we built a database of the stock prices from January 1, 2000 till date.
But we won’t be asking you to hug the next shocking thing you can lay your hands on, we have decided to give out part of the data to anyone who needs to download and use for any type of analysis or financial weapon of mass destruction that can be cooked up.
The data is available for download in CSV from Google Docs. The data we have made available ends at December 31, 2010.
By the way, download and use this data at your own peril. We make absolutely no claim that this is not more than a collection of numerical junks.

Microsoft, you've got to be kidding me!

Microsoft launched a website, yourbrowsermatters.org, to score browsers on security, which is a good thing. Thereafter they lost their ways: IE 9 is scored 4 out of 4 – which I don’t have an issue with, Chrome 14 is scored 2.5/5 and Firefox 7 scores 2. Now I’m getting very suspicious.

Then IE 6 scores 3. Cough! IE 6 of all browsers? A malware the size of a 50 ton truck could speed through any of its security holes without touching its walls and it has more holes than the colander my Grandma uses in the kitchen.

Anyway, enough said!

Power supply so good; and then so bad

I don't know if it's just my end alone but of recent the electricity supply from PHCN has been pretty good. In fact too good to be true. But who can satisfy Nigerians? Trust that I still need to gripe about it. Why? Well, it is a bit complicated. I use a prepaid meter and the non-stop electricity supply is zapping my "credit" so fast you could think that the utility meter is a stop watch. To get me even more annoyed, government announced that they are upgrading the prices to N25/KwH soon. Why do we always benchmark cost to other countries but we never do same for minimum wage or roads or rails or [*insert your gripe here*].

I have posted a variation of this table before but things have changed a bit since. The following table shows the price of electricity per Kilowatt Hour across different countries. This should serve as a quick reference to what other guys pay in these countries.

Country $/KwH N/KwH
Kingdom of Tonga 0.4570 73.12
Denmark 0.4289 68.62
Italy 0.3723 59.57
Netherlands 0.3470 55.52
Germany 0.3066 49.06
Philippines 0.2880 46.08
Sweden 0.2734 43.74
Ireland 0.2389 38.22
Spain 0.1950 31.20
France 0.1925 30.80
UK 0.1859 29.74
Croatia 0.1755 28.08
Singapore 0.1734 27.74
Portugal 0.1639 26.22
Nigeria (Proposed) 0.1563 25.00
Hong Kong 0.1230 19.68
Iceland 0.1161 18.58
Belgium 0.1143 18.29
Perú 0.1044 16.70
South Africa 0.1015 16.24
USA 0.0928 14.85
Malaysia 0.0742 11.87
Australia 0.0711 11.38
Finland 0.0695 11.12
Nigeria (Currently) 0.0625 10.00
Canada 0.0618   9.89