Part 1: Slightly inefficient, but not really a problem. You can just split each line using strread and grow the adj_close matrix each iteration... Be aware that if the number of elements in each row changes, you will get an error. In that case, you would need to force the number of items in each row vector to some value, probably by counting the number of entries in the header. That's an exercise for you =)
% Begin with 2nd line (exclude header)
readLine(buffer);
adj_close = [];
while 1
buff_line = char(readLine(buffer));
if length(buff_line)<3, break; end
vals = strread(buff_line,'%f','delimiter',',');
adj_close = [adj_close; vals'];
end
Part 2: Yes, you can use flipud to reverse the matrix.
adj_close = flipud(adj_close);
