A lot of people come to trading or investing from different backgrounds and have not formally studied Economics or the securities markets. If you fit into this group fear not as most colleges now provide course and lecture notes free online so you can study the fundamentals to your hearts content. Many of the top university offer a selection of the course materiel in the form of video lectures, audio lectures and printed lecture notes. These courses are excellent for developing a wider body of knowledge without incurring large tuition costs.

I have categorised the courses into three levels foundation, intermediate and advanced. Foundation courses are pitched at a high school graduate level and if you have done no college start here. The intermediate level is recommended for people who know and understand all the concepts at the foundation level. The advanced level courses are pitched at the graduate level and assume a fairly high level of mathematical understanding.

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In the previous article we went through the basics of importing company data from Yahoo Finance. If you are not familiar with Microsoft Excel and have not read the previous article I suggest you read that before continuing. In today’s article will be using Microsoft Excel to generate charts using market data from Yahoo Finance.

Excel Built-In Chart Types 

Excel 2007 does a fairly good job of generating stock charts automatically, given the data is laid out in the correct order. In the next few articles we will go through the basics of generating five different charts, the charts we will be generated include:

High-Low-Close bar chart.

Open-High-Low-Close candlestick chart.

Volume-High-Low-Close bar chart.

Volume-Open-High-Low-Close candlestick chart.

Adjusted close line chart.

These are just a small number of charts possible in Microsoft Excel however they are the most useful for charting stock data. Today’s focus will be on generating an adjusted close line chart.The first step in the process is to open the spreadsheet you created in the previous article. This spreadsheet contains the Microsoft End of Day data from 11/01/2008 to 8/02/2008.

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This week has been an extremely slow week as I have been sick. Here are an assortment of articles for you to enjoy. Hopefully by next week I should be fighting fit and will post more.

• John Chow shares his blog business structure.
• The Forex Project takes us to the next stage of Forex Trading.
• Dollar notches steller weekly performance.
• Expected technology sector impactors.
• NYSE Tick using sentiment to trade.
• Top Ten sectors by monthly performance.
• Credit Suisse rolls over troubled UBS.
• Financial Blog Search.
• 5 reasons good Texas hold’em players are great forex traders.
• blogonomics dissected.
• The SI swimsuit indicator (humor).
• Advance retail sales aren’t what they seem.

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This article is the next article in the Microsoft Excel tutorial series. If you are not familiar with Microsoft Excel or have not read the previous article data entry and navigation I would suggest you read it before continuing. There are many ways in which Yahoo Finance data can be imported into Microsoft Excel, however we will be focusing on the most simple. Yahoo Finance provides a good range of data.

Quotes
Which include: Summary, Options , Historical Prices and Charts.

News & Info
Which includes: Headlines, Financial Blogs, Company Events and Message Board.

Company
Which includes: Profile, Key Statistics, SEC Filings, Competitors, Industry and Components.

Analyst Coverage
Which includes: Analyst Opinion, Analyst Estimates, Research Reports and Star Analysts.

Ownership
Which includes: Major Holders, Insider Transactions, Insider Roster.

Financial’s
Which include: Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow.

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In life as in trading it is important to maintain a clear focus. It can be extremely hard to maintain ones focus, as I am sure we have all experienced. Recently I have found my focus waning hence the need for me to re-evaluate my approach not just to trading but to everyday life also. Here are five tips that will help you regain focus.

Audit what you spend your time on

Before investigating where you want to be it is important to know where you are. An easy way to start this process is to audit your time. By writing down what you currently spend your time doing will help you determine areas of inefficiency and give you a good starting point for change. To jump start this process I have attached a spreadsheet that I use to audit where I spend my time, it is broken down in hourly blocks.

This is a very important step in regaining focus. After doing this I have found several areas of inefficiency that I will be addressing. This process allows you to identify time sinks, or tasks that suck up large portions of your time. By focusing on fewer tasks clarity and focus of the reaming tasks is much simpler.

Zen to Done

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January has come and gone with rapid pace and world markets have seen downturns and US recession is being talked about in nearly every media article. Unless you have studied Macroeconomics you may not know how a recession is defined quantitatively.

A recession is  defined as negative real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth for two successive quarters.

Now that we have that out of the way with lets get onto our list of weekend reading. Time to sit back grab a cup of coffee and look through some articles that are of interest to all of the finance geeks out there. This weeks list will be a bit longer then usual.

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