WSJ import into Google sheets stopped working

[jason]

Hello,
I've been importing the US Treasury prices from the Wall Street Journal bond pricing page into my Google sheet for years. It stopped working for me recently. Have other people noticed the same thing? Is there a workaround or alternative source?
Thanks!

[flyingpylon]

Looks like they are no longer using a simple HTML table to display the data, so the Google Sheets formula fails. That sucks.

If anyone is good with regular expressions, the data is still there and could probably be retrieved. Unfortunately I am short on both regex skills and time to figure it out, so maybe there's another source out there.

[dualstow]

A few weeks ago, I started just typing in the values from Vanguard occasionally. I was going to look for a real fix, but I noticed the stock prices Google Sheets was pulling weren’t that hot either. They didn’t match Yahoo & Vanguard.

[jason]

The pricing data does load into the source code of the URL, so if there is a possibility of somehow parsing the source code and inserting the data into a Google sheet, that would be great. This is way over my head, technically.

[Mark Leavy]

Stopped working for me also. I couldn't figure out how to get the data out of the WSJ page, so in the meantime, I've reverted back to pulling the data from Treasury Direct.

Code: Select all

=importhtml("https://www.treasurydirect.gov/GA-FI/FedInvest/todaySecurityPriceDate.htm","table",1) 

Unfortunately, it is only closing prices and only posted for a few hours per day. Most of the time it is a bad link.

If anyone has a better fix, I'm all ears.
Mark

[jason]

Does anyone know if there are other Google sheets functions that can work such as these?
ImportXML
ImportFEED
ImportDATA

[mukramesh]

Ayah, I thought it was just my Google sheet that stopped working! It was nice being able to see the entire yield curve at a glance.

Has anyone found a decent workaround yet?

[Kbg]

Excel has some excellent tools for data scrapping now. But yeah, you pay for it and you have to learn how to use the tools.

[escafandro]

Hi, any news with this issue?

[jason]

I've been reading online how you can extract/scrape data from websites using a Google Apps Script, but I can't figure it out. Does anyone know how to write a script and run it in google sheets? There has got to be a way to get the WSJ data imported into a Google spread sheet. Please help!!

[jason]

Hello,
Now the bond prices at treasurydirect.gov are not importing into my google sheet. Is anyone having success with importing Treasury prices into a google sheet? If so, how? Please help!

[jason]

*bump*
Is anyone able to import Treasury prices into Google sheets? Nothing is working for me now.

[Mark Leavy]

The short answer is "no".

My current hack:

Every morning when I update my accounts, I open:
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/bonds/treasuries
In one tab of a browser.

Using my cursor I manually select the table and then copy and paste it into a "Bonds Prices" sheet in my primary Google spread sheet. From there, all of my old formulas take over and work just fine.

It adds a few seconds to my normal morning routine - and it is not fully automatic. But it works.

[mukramesh]

My current hack:

Omg I can't believe I didn't realize this. Works for me too. Thanks for the tip.

[mg315]

I think I found a way to get somewhat accurate pricing for treasury bonds in Google Sheets.

You can use the TYX interest rate option to get the current yield on a 30yr treasury. With your particular bond's settlement date, maturity date, and interest rate, you can use the PRICE() function to calculate the current value of the bond.

Ex: I have a 30yr treasury bond with a 2% rate, settlement date of 2/18/20 and a maturity date of 2/15/50. This gives me an estimated price for the bond:

Code: Select all

=PRICE(DATE(2020,2,18),DATE(2050,2,15),.02,GOOGLEFINANCE("TYX")/1000,100,2)

The only problem with this approach is you're using the yield of a fresh 30yr bond on a bond with a shorter maturity. You could combine this with the 10yr interest rate option (TNX) to estimate the yield at your specific maturity, but that's just as likely to be wrong in the other direction because the yield curve isn't a straight line. Averaging the current 10yr and 30yr yields results in a 0.89% estimated 20yr yield, while the actual 20yr yield is 1.01%.

This approach works fine for my needs right now. If I get close to a rebalancing band or my bonds approach 20yr I'll manually pull in the data to get an accurate price.

[jhogue]

As an alternative, Fidelity's website has a constantly updated table of fixed income yields, including Treasury, corporate, and municipal bonds.
You don't have to be a Fidelity customer to use it and you don't have to import it into Google sheets to use it.

See: https://fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/f ... ding?bar=p

To get the current price of Treasury bonds, you select the desired maturity. The bid/ask price spread for each of the available issues with that maturity will appear in table format. They also have a pop out yield table available, which I find useful.

[dualstow]

Google sheets is not even working with stock prices lately. I’ve all but given up on them for live prices of any kind.