Currency of stock prices

B

Bigchazza

Hi. I am using the free Aplha Vantage API to build a backtesting/automated trade system. I'm just looking at stocks right now, so that is the only instrument I pull from the API. I notice that US stocks are in dollars and UK ones in pence, but there is nothing to indicate this difference within the data (I'm talking about the denomination difference, not the currency - if US were in cents and UK in pennies it would be the same denomination). This convention seems to be the same on Yahoo Finance and the couple of brokers I have access to. To make things even more confusing, UK ETFs are in GBP on all these platforms.

This is causing me a bit of a headache because I need my denominations to be consistent between currencies. Or if they're not, at least predictably inconsistent!

Is there some stock price currency convention that I am not party to?
 
jharmon said:
Quite simply, stocks traded on LSE trade in pence, not pounds.

Professional platforms show a different currency pence-denominated instruments. At least two I've seen GBp (note the use of lowercase p) used for this.

Alphavantage is a cheap retail level service - maybe it doesn't have those attributes?
PS - https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/is-alpha-vantage-dead.347236/#post-5154091
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A cheap retail service for a cheap retail guy! But yes I am aware of potential limitations of using this level of service. Serves the purpose for constructing the mechanical side and (or so I thought) backtesting strategies - I'll do some more looking into that. I intended to use broker data (probably IB) for going live.
 
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