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

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Executive Summary
Background
            In today’s financial world, prospective investors constantly seek ways to quickly and efficiently obtain information regarding the quality of various investment opportunities. For years, the stock market has been one of the most common sources of such investing. Often considered the father of modern financial analysis, Benjamin Graham devised a list of ten “hurdles,” or benchmarks, by which one could use to measure the overall quality of a stock to determine whether it would be a good investment. Inspired by the class’s Fallen Angel assignment, I created this project to test these hurdles when given a valid ticker symbol for a publicly traded company.
                For reference, a list of Benjamin Graham’s Ten Hurdles is included below:
1. An earnings-to-price yield at least twice the AAA bond rate.
2. P/E ratio less than 40% of the highest P/E ratio the stock had over the past 5 years.
3. Dividend yield of at least 2/3 the AAA bond yield.
4. Stock price below 2/3 of tangible book value per share.
5. Stock price below 2/3 of Net Current Asset Value.
6. Total debt less than book value.
7. Current ratio greater than 2.
8. Total debt less than 2 times Net Current Asset Value.
9. Earnings growth of prior 10 years at least at a 7% annual compound rate.
10. Stability of growth of earnings in that no more than 2 declines of 5% or more in year-end earnings in the prior ten years are permissible.

Solution Overview

            This project includes using a series of three web queries to effectively gather the data as well as a user form to (1) allow the user to enter a valid stock ticker symbol, (2) execute the web queries, and (3) display the results of the analysis. The project essentially consisted of the following five parts: Part 1 automated a web query for a particular stock provided by the user; Part 2 automated a query that retrieved the latest AAA bond information; Part 3 consisted of a query that retrieved a company’s most recent balance sheet line items; Part 4 analyzed the data from the three queries and used the results to determine whether the stock passed the different hurdles; and Part 5 consisted of loading that information into the user form and creating custom buttons on the ribbon for the user’s convenience.

Excel Spreadsheet Link:
Project Write-up Link:

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