Our club maintains a "watch list" from which we can select a
stock for investing at monthly meetings. Stock are added and
if not acted upon are dropped on sixth month. Membership
would like to have listings of today's price and today's
P/E, yesterdays price only and price and P/E a month ago on
same sheet. We have been doing this manually but I'm hoping
this can be done automatically. Any ideas?

Val,

Well, nobody else is jumping in to answer this one, so I'll
give it a try. A lot depends on what software you have & are
familiar with. Here are a few ideas:

Excel: Probably the most versatile, but expensive & not too
easy to use if you're just starting. There are a couple of
useful articles on pulling data from the Web into Excel:
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-stock-quotes.html
http://vertex42.com/News/excel-web-query.html
The first is about stock quotes in particular.

Yahoo! Finance: this lets you define both views and
portfolios, where a view defines the columns and a portfolio
is a list of stocks. Some of what you want in your watchlist
can be done this way, including P/E, though probably not
last month's price. The problem with this is that although
it looks fine on the screen, I haven't found a good way to
get it onto paper, which seems to be what you want to do.

Quicken: Some versions of Quicken will retrieve stock
quotes, but its ability to let you define a set of columns
is a bit limited. Then again, I don't know a lot about
Quicken, so maybe I'm overlooking something.

Broker-provided software: this should be able to do a
watchlist too, with prices, but whether it will report what
you want is another question.

If you do find a solution that works for you, please post
here & tell us about it. I'd like to be able to do something
similar.

Mike Carroll

Thank you for your reply Michael, I will check out both suggestions an if
successful will let you know. We in the past we hired a bookkeeper but she
just got too old and wanted to retire.
Val




----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Carroll" <mike_carroll@bivio.com>
To: <club_cafe@bivio.com>
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 5:24 PM
Subject: club_cafe: Re: watch list of stocks


> Val,
>
> Well, nobody else is jumping in to answer this one, so I'll
> give it a try. A lot depends on what software you have & are
> familiar with. Here are a few ideas:
>
> Excel: Probably the most versatile, but expensive & not too
> easy to use if you're just starting. There are a couple of
> useful articles on pulling data from the Web into Excel:
> http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-stock-quotes.html
> http://vertex42.com/News/excel-web-query.html
> The first is about stock quotes in particular.
>
> Yahoo! Finance: this lets you define both views and
> portfolios, where a view defines the columns and a portfolio
> is a list of stocks. Some of what you want in your watchlist
> can be done this way, including P/E, though probably not
> last month's price. The problem with this is that although
> it looks fine on the screen, I haven't found a good way to
> get it onto paper, which seems to be what you want to do.
>
> Quicken: Some versions of Quicken will retrieve stock
> quotes, but its ability to let you define a set of columns
> is a bit limited. Then again, I don't know a lot about
> Quicken, so maybe I'm overlooking something.
>
> Broker-provided software: this should be able to do a
> watchlist too, with prices, but whether it will report what
> you want is another question.
>
> If you do find a solution that works for you, please post
> here & tell us about it. I'd like to be able to do something
> similar.
>
> Mike Carroll