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, March 29, 2010

Steve Hutchinson Semester Final Project

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10w/septrium/MyStockPicker.xlsm

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10w/septrium/executive_summary.pdf

One of the biggest challenges in business is to be able to gather large amounts of information in a timely manner. Specifically, individual analysts often spend a great amount of time trying to gather stock information from the internet so they can determine which stock investments are most likely to perform well. However, many analysts do not possess enough knowledge to automate the process, which leaves them with the undesirable task of manually wading through internet information pages manually. Individual investors suffer from the same problem and often have even less time to look for information online and thus are prevented from obtaining enough information to make an informed investment decision. In short, the lack of an automated data extraction tool reduces individual productivity for professional and individual investors alike.
The MyStockPicker application was written to aid in the investment process by decreasing the amount of time spent looking through investment information. The application was designed with a simple user interface to specify the options used to run the program. Once the user has inputted the type of report desired, the application will go out and retrieve the information and display it on a spreadsheet. The application will allow the user to retrieve data from the internet (currently hard-coded to finance.yahoo.com) or to from a database where a previous report was stored. Additionally, the application will allow the user to select all tickers on the S&P 500, a subset of that list, or from a custom list of tickers. Furthermore, the user can add a list of constraints, which can be used to determine which records are filtered from the spreadsheet. The application can be set to notify the user via email or text when the report has finished, allowing the user to tend to other tasks while waiting for the report to finish. Finally, reports can be saved to an access database for later retrieval.