These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Monday, December 6, 2010

Executive Summary: Stock Picker

Executive Summary

In order to make money on the side, and earn a better return on my money as opposed to using a savings account, I trade stocks. One thing that I have noticed over and over in the stock market is that investors tend to overreact. Whenever investors get overly excited or overly spooked by news or economic data it opens up the possibility that a stock’s price will be traded above or below its true value. One example of this was the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In a matter of days BP’s stock price plummeted from around $60 a share to under $30 a share. The market essentially cut BP’s market capitalization in half, a loss of roughly $100 billion dollars. This occurred in spite of the fact that experts were predicting the total liabilities of BP to be between $30 and $60 billion. Although this is an extreme example these situations occur frequently in the market. Unfortunately for standard investors these market overreactions are often exploited by institutional investors in after-hours or early morning trading. I wanted to create a tool that can be used to calculate the percentage change data for all stocks in a list, in this case all stocks on the NYSE or NASDAQ. The spreadsheet then identifies the five biggest gainers and losers for the day and outputs that data into a separate sheet for review.

Writeup

Project Excel File

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