How Does Excel Help Traders?

Yeah, I use Ooo on XP. But my reasons are that I see no sense in buying something I can get for free.

 

Actually, I already have Excel. I just don't know how to use it to it's potential.

 

I can't get anything uploaded to it...(maybe my worksheets are too complicated?)

I will try again tomorrow...

Thanks!

 

So is there a book or something that teaches traders how to code in excel just for traders?

 

Ah ha!, isee where iagree (8 posts) is going.

The leading (expecting) answer would be:

There are tons of books out there showing how to code in VB/VBA, but they are way too technical. Wouldn't it be nice to have a simple book written by traders for traders that focuses on programming of trading strategies in Excel ( if the strategies are real and working even better )?

See http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71324&highlight=programming

But I guess iagree already knew that!

 

yes it would be nice.

 

You're not familiar with this Excel function? Its a must-have for any trader:

 

You need to know how to write codes and learning it for use in trading is much harder than wealthlab, Easylanguage , amibroker...if you are beginner

 

I find these sites helpful to my excel trading:

http://ta-lib.org/ & http://www.esquotes.com/

 

In itself, Excel does not give you an advantage. Excel is just a tool, so how you use it and how effectively you use it is up to you.

Spreadsheet programs, like Excel, allow you to do your sums very easily, everything from simple addition to complicated statistics. It's like a notepad for figures. If you plan to do any trading or investment you should first learn how to use a spreadsheet. At the very least it will get you in the right mindset for dealing with time series data, visualising that data and analysing changes in that data.

I have to say that when I was a student, I never used spreadsheets; I was mystified as to why people might ever need them. Now that I work for my living Excel is permanently open on my PC and I simply could not work without it (or a similar application). I use it to model company earnings and tons of other things. In a trading perspective it would be useful for tracking your trades and analysing your performance. It can also be used to build custom applications; you're unlikely to need to know much about that for a while.

Go to www.openoffice.org and download the Calc application (or the whole suite). Download some share price data from somewhere (Yahoo?) and start playing with it in Calc. Try formatting data, inserting percent changes or moving averages, creating charts and so on. You'll learn. Calc is similar to Excel and an acceptable substitute. If you have spare cash, just buy Excel or Microsoft Office as there's more support and information for them than for Calc.

Suss