Adjusted Close vs Close Price: What's the Difference?

When you pull price history, you'll see two closing prices for each day: the close and the adjusted close. Knowing which to use is the difference between a correct analysis and a badly wrong one.

Close — the as-traded price

The close is the actual price the stock traded at on that day, exactly as reported by the exchange. It's the right figure when you want to know "what did this cost on that date?"

Adjusted close — the continuous series

When a company does a stock split or bonus issue, the share price drops overnight even though nothing about the company's value changed. On a raw chart that looks like a crash. The adjusted close rewrites the historical prices by a factor so the series stays continuous across those events — which is what you need to compute accurate returns over time.

A worked example

Suppose a stock closes at ₹1,000, then does a 1:2 split so it opens near ₹500. The raw close shows ₹1,000 then ₹500 — a fake 50% drop. The adjusted close scales the pre-split prices down by the split factor, so the ₹1,000 shows as ₹500 and the series flows smoothly. A return calculation on the raw close would report a 50% loss that never happened.

Which to use

• Use close for "what did it trade at on this date."
• Use adjusted close for returns, charts, and any multi-period comparison that spans a split or bonus.

Both are returned per day by the prices endpoint, with the adjustment_factor that links them. Note that volume is reported raw (not adjusted).