Posted on 11 April 2008
My copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition arrived today and I made sure I installed it promptly. The software comes packaged in the new style plastic boxes, much like Office and Vista. There are two DVD’s one contains Visual Studio 2008 and MSDN documentation and the second contains SQL Server 2005 Developers Edition. I have not had a chance to properly take it for a test run but after I do I will post a review. The install process was extremely simple, however I uninstalled my CTP releases first.
Install Process
The install process is really basic and can be summarised in just three steps as highlighted below.
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Posted on 09 April 2008
This is part six of our Microsoft Excel Tutorial Series, if you haven’t read the previous articles you can find them here:
An Introduction to Microsoft Excel 2007
The basic’s data entry and navigation
Importing Market Data from Yahoo Finance
The basic’s of charting market data the line chart
The basics of charting market data the bar chart
Today we will be looking at setting up candlestick charts in Excel. This tutorial will go through producing the two built in Excel versions of candlestick charts. Normally a candlestick chart will display open, high, low and close and the range for a given period. They are a great tool to quickly gauge price action.
Candlestick Chart
I am going to assume that you are familiar with candlestick charts, however if you are new to these type of charts I have included some useful resources on the topic of candlestick charting below.
Books
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Posted on 19 March 2008
This is part five of our Microsoft Excel Tutorial Series, if you haven’t read the previous articles you can find them here:
An Introduction to Microsoft Excel 2007
The basic’s data entry and navigation
Importing Market Data from Yahoo Finance
The basic’s of charting market data the line chart
Today we will be looking at bar charts and the two built in Excel versions of bar charts. Normally a bar chart will display open, high, low and close however in Excel the built in bar charts only display high low and close.
Bar Chart
The image shows a single bar for a given time period. The horizontal line on the left hand side of the bar shows the price at which the given security opens at. The horizontal line on the right side of the bar shows the price that the security has closed at. The height of the bar shows the range that the security traded between for a given period.
In the standard bar chart in Excel 2007 the closing price is highlighted with a triangle or an X rather then a horizontal line.
As with the previous article we will be working with our Microsoft End of Day stock data imported from Yahoo Finance. The first step is to open the MSFT.xlsx spreadsheet in Excel 2007.
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Posted on 25 February 2008
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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Posted on 11 February 2008
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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Posted on 23 January 2008
The portfolio I will be constructing is based on the five Australian stocks highlighted in Smart Investor magazine. If you haven’t read the previous article on “Economic Moats” I would advise you to read that before reading this article. The tool I will be using for this is Google Finance, therefore you will need to sign up for a Google account (this is free). Go to Google Accounts and click on “create an account now “. Once you are logged in go to Google Finance click create portfolio and name the portfolio and then add desired stock.
Portfolio Calculations
In order to determine how much money we can allocate to each share we will have to do a few simple calculations. Firstly we work out each shares maximum share of equity, as we are giving equal weight to each different stock this is simply: Read the full story
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