One of the more interesting applications of statistics is the analysis of stock quotation data. A solid analysis can give you an advantage when deciding which shares to buy. Also you can search for patterns; which shares move together with others..? However, the first step is collecting all the data which are required – and this is a cumbersome task!
I found lots of discussions in various forums, on StackOverflow and so on. But nobody provided a solution for downloading a bulk of data at once. As a consequence, I created my own solution (which you can download here) based on the Google Finance API.