Stock Picker

by Brent Walker

Executive Summary

In the world of finance there are few problems more complex than picking which stocks to invest in. In the United States there is an active market for over 10,000 publicly traded stocks. My project is a program that uses MS Excel along with publicly available information accessible on the internet to take a first cut at identifying stocks that are candidates for more in-depth research.

With this program, the user can set upper and lower bounds for criteria such as Price/Earnings Ratio, Dividend Yield, or even Beta depending on the type of investment they are looking for. Additionally, the user can select specific companies that they would like to include in their custom results. Depending on the criteria the user selects, they could end up with twenty or more stocks to look at. Most investors do not have the financial means to make a meaningful investment in that many different stocks. With this in mind, the program creates a new sheet listing each of the stocks, along with various market data relating to the stocks, so that the user can more easily determine which will be the most attractive. If the user is dissatisfied with the number of stocks selected, they can chose to re-run the pogram by clicking on a conveniently located button inside the workbook.

Excel File:
http://gove.net/courses/excel/projects/BrentWalker/StockPicker.xlsm

PDF Write-up:
http://gove.net/courses/excel/projects/BrentWalker/StockPickerWriteUp.pdf

Happy Stock Picking!