pricehistory

Price history is the record of the historical prices at which a particular asset, product, or service has traded or been sold over a period of time. It is typically represented as a time series, with entries that include a date and a price in a given currency.

Researchers and practitioners gather price histories from exchanges, marketplaces, retailers, and data aggregators. Methods include direct transaction records, scraping of listing prices, and official price indices. Prices may be adjusted for inflation to enable cross-period comparisons.

An essential aspect is the data structure: time-stamped observations, frequency (tick, daily, weekly, monthly), and currency. Clean datasets handle missing values, outliers, and revisions, sometimes by interpolation or smoothing.

Price histories support trend analysis, forecasting, pricing strategy, index construction, and historical benchmarking. They enable calculations such as percentage changes, moving averages, volatility, and seasonality.

Limitations include incomplete coverage, revisions to past prices, differing price definitions (transaction price, list price, or adjusted price), and biases from survivorship or selection. Users must understand context, data provenance, and methodological choices.

In finance, stock price history shows daily closing prices; in retail, a product’s price history tracks promotions and price drops.