Hello.
I tied to download some screens this morning to excel and after a few downloads I could only download excel spreadsheet with no data and statement that “Maximum number of report downloads per day exceeded”. I am doing this every morning and this is the first time this happened. Is this some kind of error or a new policy for managing downloads into excel?
Thanks.
p.
We are negotiating a new data contract and the download is a sticky point. We decided to add this policy in advance to understand the reasons for downloads. Let us know why you need the downloads. Is there a functionality missing? We can easily add functionality to do the analysis within P123. Thanks
Hi Marco
This is going to adversely affect me as well.
Could you provide some clarity on what the actual limits
for downloading are?
Essentially, I have an offline market-timing engine written
in python, that utilises data pulled down from screens.
Being able to explore the data in an interactive session
with proper statistical methods, graphing tools etc, is
a huge boon.
Unless you’re going to provide a full, extensible interactive
scripting language in P123, its not really functionality that
can be ‘added in’.
In an ideal world I’d have a complete local copy of the P123
database that gets daily or weekly sync updates.
I’m assuming this is just the sort of thing your data provider
doesn’t want happening, but I’m wondering what sort of
compromises are going to be available - is there some level
of downloadability you’re pushing for in the new contract?
Could greater access to data be incorporated into the
pricing tier somehow?
Hi Marco,
I am using Excel for my quick stock check while I trade. I use real time data from 2 other sources in Excel (price and fundamentals) and in additions yst rankings of stocks (ranked by several ranking systems and each ranking downloaded from p123 to a separate sheet). When I select my watch list during day I quickly rank selected stocks based on different criteria.
It is very important for me to download data to excel as excel integrates further real time data from other sources along with rankings from p123.
In addition there is a period from time to time that I download data from screener’s backtest where I screen for certain type of conditions. Then I use no. of stocks that pass the screen each day for my further analysis in excel or in other systems (Amibroker). Seeing how many of stocks met certain criteria I can build market breadth market timing models. But this is not regular (these downloads I make when I have a need to have a deep look at market timing). Rankings of stocks I download I mentioned I download each day, it is part of daily routine.
p.
What is the maximum? I download screen results to excel and combine with other price data to create watch lists, calculate orders, and track pricing in real time. I often download sim trade results to do further analysis (such as estimate results with limit orders). I also download performance results for multiple sims to combine them in Excel to see how they are correlated and how they perform as part of a portfolio. P123 may be able to do some of this (limit orders, combine sims) but cannot replicate the limitless custom functionality available in excel. The download is a key feature.
Don
Looks like most people don’t need data columns. We will be able to provide a fixed set of 50 data columns, like the ones in the pre-formatted reports.
I’ll relax the download restriction now.
In the next release downloads after a certain TBD limit will only show few columns, like ticker,name,ranks, and few others.
Thank you for your patience
dss: are the pre-set reports good enough for you?
Thanks for the clarification Marco -
The pre-sets provide a reasonable set of data, although they are a bit selective -
showing growth rates for sales and EPS, for example, but not showing any
balance or income sheet information.
As I said, in an ideal world, we’d retain access to everything, but I understand
that won’t be the case 
One thing I’d really like to retain access to is the stock ID (rather than just the
ticker symbol). It really helps keep things aligned, disambiguating new
listings/tickerchanges etc.
Lastly, is there an approximate date for when the ‘next release’ restrictions will
come into effect?
-David
dss, probably this weekend. Unfortunately stockid also needs to be disabled (return NA).
hmm i am wondering more and more if pf123/compustat is my product. I hate not being in control of the data I pay for (using). Compare the situation to AAII sipro where you get a local copy of the data for under 200$. I would prefer compustat data (pf123). I would be willing to use data on a pay to rent basis. But being restricted in this way - can’t crunch the data in my way - just in order to satisfy compustat needs for copy protection seems not to meet customers targets and to fool us a little bit. So it all is about lesser data quality (sipro) or “data in prison”.
Just some thoughts. Sorry for being angry, but I thinks its such a bad compustat thing. Kudoos for pf123 software development but I have a PC and compiler, not only a browser!
I received this error message today after only a few downloads - maybe 4 or 5? This is a big problem for me. I sometimes need to download the data to see why a rank or sim is working the way it is. Please let me know if I can get more downloads per day.
thanks, Debbie
Me too. Have you already relaxed the restriction already?
thanks, Nico
I ran into this limit today w/ a screen that just looked at price and volume. What is the max number of downloads/day?
Both my understanding and my experience indicate that the limitation
(unless it has been raised already) has been 10 screen downloads/day.
Those with 250 or fewer lines count as 1 download and those with
251-500 lines count as 2.
FWIW Marco, this limit is fine for my humble purposes.
bump
can the limit be raised for screens that just dump price/volume?
Ran into this again. Can this be addressed? What is the maximum number of d/l per day? Whatever it is, please double it.
This restriction was set in place because of the ludicrous requests from S&P Global. But with Factset is it still worth having that limitation? Yeah doubling it would be awesome.
It is still baked into our FactSet contract as well. We can bring it up when we next renegotiate, but I don’t know when that is.
So what is the maximum d/l count? And why not just hide FS data? The screen results I want to d/l only use price and volume. Please help.
EDIT: actually, the screens use price and volume - I just want to d/l the ticker symbols. No FS data there.