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

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Stock Performance Indices, Tommy Smith

While working at an investment bank this summer, an organization that advises organizations on corporate finance issues, I had to pull stock information from the web and create graphs showing stock price performance of various industry segments to be used in presentations nearly daily. The graphs needed to be formatted with the bank’s formatting and color schemes, so I couldn’t just paste graphs from Yahoo or Capital IQ. I had to download data from the Internet to Excel and construct a chart by hand. Also, I had to combine the performance of any number of stocks to create customized industry segment performance indices. I therefore attempted to automate a program by recording macros that would pull information from Capital IQ and graph the data. However, with my limited knowledge of VBA, the program I created was inefficient, slow, and riddled with errors.

The new program I created pulls stock price information from Yahoo! and plots a line graph with stock performance of several industry segments against the performance of the S&P. The user selects which stocks to plot, which segments they are included in, and a time period through which to pull information. I will use this program extensively upon beginning work in June at an investment bank in New York City.

Write-Up: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/smitht3/Final_write_up.pdf

Excel file: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/smitht3/Stock_Price_Performance_Indexv5.xlsm

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