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

Friday, December 11, 2015

FRED Real Estate Indices, Chart Creation, and Chart Extraction into Microsoft® PowerPoint®

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REAL ESTATE INDICES & CHARTS FROM FRED
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Extracting Real Estate Specific Indices from the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED)

I manage a real estate private equity fund in Henderson, Nevada. The name is Green Mesa Capital, LLC.  Green Mesa Capital, LLC (the “Company”) was formed in 2014 as a firm specializing in alternative investments with a particular focus on institutional-grade real estate throughout North America and Europe. In addition, the Company advises clients in selecting highest and best use tangency for debt and equity real estate transactions. Activities of the Company include applied value investing strategies, investment research, portfolio design, joint ventures, asset management, and optimizing asset sales.

One of the most repetitive tasks is that of creating investor presentation(s). With no previous programming experience, getting up-to-date macroeconomic data, and market data, is not only taxing on time, but also the mind. If I could automate the data gathering process, I could work more on the qualitative commentary. On a quarterly basis, a presentation of the current market is needed. The current process is a three step process: (i) download the data from FRED,  or other economic data website(s); (ii) manually clean and import data into a new Microsoft® Excel®  tab, and create an appropriate chart; and (iii) transfer each chart into Microsoft® PowerPoint®. My entire objective for enrolling in this course was simply to perfect this task. If it could be done, the ROI on my time, and the professionalism on slides, would be infinite.

To work properly, please download the following three files, and have Microsoft® PowerPoint® open.

Project File: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15f/rnorton/Green_Mesa_Capital_VBA_Write-up_by_Randy_Norton.xlsm

Write-up: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15f/rnorton/Green_Mesa_Capital_VBA_Write-up_by_Randy_Norton.pdf

Excel Add-in: Please see https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred-addin/

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