All serious investors and traders are vitally interested in creating lists of stocks that have something in common. Industry classification or taxonomy is a major concern of the major financial data players who have invested a lot of money in these things over the years.
The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) was developed in 1999 by MSCI and SPGI. Every US stock is assigned an eight digit GICS code which denotes the sub-industry.
The best way to analyze the US stock market nowadays is to have all the data local on the analyst’s PC. End of day and fundamental data is updated by the financial data provider after the market closes, these updates can be applied to the PC in about a minute.
I was impressed that from a blank spreadsheet, all the current stocks in the S&P 1500 along with relevant fundamental numbers and industry sector information can be built in less than 10 seconds.
There are at least two companies that do the local database thing: Norgatedata.com and EODHD.com. EODHD is more comprehensive and easier to interface with but costs more money… both are way less than $100/month.
Recently, I was taking a look at dynamic list building and noticed the GICS code.
MSCI describes GSCI starting here. The link contains a downloadable spreadsheet of the current GICS structure. The spreadsheet is OK for looking at but the structure should be modified.
My concept of a super fast processing structure is in the GICSArray spreadsheet below. The idea is to drastically minimize array lookups. I plan to expand this discussion. This post is written to test the download.
