Saturday, June 14, 2008
Coin Tosses and Stock Price Charts
Prior to the 1960’s, most investors believed that future securities prices could be predicted (and that great riches were to be had) if only they could discover the secret. Many investors still believe this today, despite much evidence that suggests that they would be best served by simply owning the entire market (investing in index funds) rather than trying to pick individual stocks.
The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) essentially states that techniques such as fundamental and technical analysis cannot be used to consistently earn excess profits in the long run. The EMH began with
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Sunday, February 03, 2008
Charting Economic Time Series with Shaded Recessions
If you read the business press or government economic reports, then you have undoubtedly seen charts that show recessionary periods with shading. In this post I will demonstrate how to create this type of chart in Excel 2007. The same technique is applicable to all versions of Excel, though the mechanics of creating the charts in earlier versions are slightly different. Users of other spreadsheets, such as Open Office Calc should be able to use a similar procedure.
Obviously, if we are to chart an economic data series and shade the recessions then we need data. For this post I will be
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Friday, January 04, 2008
Chart the Yield Curve Using Yahoo! Finance Data
The U.S. Treasury yield curve is of tremendous importance in the financial world, so those of us who teach finance often find it desirable to show a chart of the current yield curve. I’ve used many sources over the years, but my favorite disappeared a few years ago. The data is readily available, so creating your own yield curve isn’t that difficult. It is a bit of a hassle, though. In this post I’m going to show how you can create a “live” U.S. Treasury yield curve using Excel’s Web Query feature and data from Yahoo! Finance.
If you go to the Yahoo! Finance Bonds Center you will see a
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Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Adding an Average Line to a Chart Using Defined Names
Please Note: This technique appears not to work in Excel 2007 (SP 1). For some reason, not explained by Microsoft as far as I can tell, some (but not all) named ranges are no longer allowed in the Series() function. This appears to be yet another problem with the new charting engine. So, this post only applies to Excel 2003 and earlier versions.
I was perusing Yahoo! Answers looking for interesting questions and I ran across one that asked how you can add an line that represents the average of a data series to a chart of that series. The most obvious way to do this would be to use a
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Monday, July 30, 2007
Video: Using Controls to Change Chart Data
One of the best things about Excel is its seemingly infinite flexibility. In this video I demonstrate how you can use controls from the Forms toolbar to change the data in charts. There are so many ways to use this technique for presentations that it was difficult to choose one. I decided to show a very simple example that compares some financial ratios for GE over time to the industry averages.
The basic idea is that you use a control (a drop-down list in this example) to choose which of several data series to display in the chart. As part of the formatting of the control, you will
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