Stock Price Charts

Why are stock option historical price charts so limited and so hard to find?

Public Comments

1. Do you mean share price history charts? If so check out http://finance.yahoo.com e.g. the share price for Yahoo: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO and then you can change the time period of 1 year if it is too limited for you or you can search for other company's stocks.
2. Very simply, that data is worth money. Second, the volume of data on just one stock is mind boggling. It becomes a maintenance nightmare to store that much data on hundreds of stocks. For a big stock like IBM, you've got at least 15 strike prices for the calls and 15 for the puts. Multiply that times at least a dozen expiration months, plus the Leaps. For Open, High, Low and Close data, you've got thousands of data points for each optionable stock each day, and that's just closing data. Intraday data becomes a nightmare, and worth a LOT of money. It takes a lot of work to store that data, and time is money, and it takes a lot of space, and real estate is expensive. No way they're going to give that away for free.