How to Monitor Stock Prices in Microsoft Excel

Series Summary

Personal finance is the application of financial principles to the monetary decisions of an individual or family unit. It addresses the ways in which individuals or families obtain, budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time, while taking various financial risks and future life events into account. Components of personal finance might include checking and savings accounts, credit cards and consumer loans, investments in the stock market, retirement plans, social security benefits, insurance policies, and income tax management. In this free video series, a personal asset manager provides information on using the stock market effectively and efficiently. Find out how to invest in the stock market, how to declare stock splits on income tax, and how to exercise stock options. Learn about stock investment accounts, stock buybacks and stock swap options. Make smarter investments in the stock market with tips and financial advice in these free videos.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Roger Groh, we're here today to talk about how you can monitor stock prices through Microsoft Excel. Well really there are two ways to do this, one is, in either case you have to have Excel, number one, then number two, you have to put into Excel the names of companies that you would like to monitor. In addition you also have to get into that spreadsheet the prices of those companies on whatever days you're considering. Now there are lots of programs that will expedite that for you, at the top end is Bloomberg, it's very expensive for the average person, but it's a wonderful way to scan different databases and dump all that data prepared into an Excel spreadsheet that you can then manipulate to help develop the type of investment rational that you use going forward. On the other side of the coin is, you can physically go in and type in corporate names and then everyday go into the newspaper and type in prices and just track it that way. The hybrid is where you type in names or you develop a very limited portfolio and then you dump a very limited portfolio from a database at Schwab at Smith Barney or Bloomberg or Reuters or others into an Excel sheet. Now the difference is that your not going to get very many data points at doing that, but it is an efficient way of looking at a limited number of companies, lets say less than a hundred, and where you can reliably dump data from any of those databases into Excel. Generally the dumps are free, what they really want you to do is to look at their website and that's how they make their money. So I'm Roger Groh, and that's how you can use Excel to help track stock prices."