Online Investing

In addition, Excel can digest data—downloading data from the Web to feed your analyses; validating the values you enter to ensure that they are appropriate; sorting, filtering, and highlighting financial values to hide poor results or emphasi...

Some web sites include links to download spreadsheets, text files of prices, or other financial data to your computer. Other sites offer subscriptions to downloadable data. However, if you can accept with equanimity the inevitable web page ch...

You need the information, but you can also get lost in the forest as you scrutinize every tree. Excel charts [Hack #13] are good for emphasizing trends in sets of numbers, such as sales and earnings growth, or P/E ratio changes, but Excel c...

It's easier to write code in even the most cryptic of programming languages. There, you often have a development environment that provides tips for function parameters; you can code and separately test subroutines and objects, or you can cons...

Growth is usually expressed as an annualized, compounded rate, because that makes it easier to compare growth rates between companies. Stability is most often measured using the coefficient of determination or R-Squared [Hack #35]. You can...

However, when you store a great deal of data in Excel, cell addresses might be hard to handle. If you move data around, formulas that use cell addresses might stop working properly. Worksheets are more flexible when you retrieve data using Ex...

For a while, you must refresh your memory each time you look at a financial measure—"Why should I care about this?" or "Is this number good or bad?" Suppose you build a fancy spreadsheet for evaluating investments. Then, after a well-deserved...

A pie chart handily illustrates your portfolio asset allocation, whereas a stacked area chart can emphasize the changes in your asset allocation over time. Regardless of the type of financial data you want to visualize, it's easy to build a c...