My father is an accomplished (but retired) international corporate mogul. I frequently solicit him for ideas and advice, but once in a while I find I know something he doesn’t. In the course of recent discussions, he asked me if I could create a spreadsheet that will pull currency and stock prices and account for profit/loss. I thought the end result was a pretty good tool, so I’m sharing it with you.

.zip (20 KB)

http://www.eclectricity.com/StockForex.zip

• You’ll need Excel 2007, and the MSN Money Central addin for Excel to view this document correctly.
• You’ll also need to enable macros after opening the document

To refresh your stock and currency quotes, click on the Data Tab, and then click “Refresh All”.

The currency tab will handle dollar buy/sell transactions, as well as cross-rate transactions. A cross-rate calculator is included.

To insert a new trade, simply move to the last row of any table and press TAB to insert a new line.

Profit/Loss is automatically calculated based on your entered purchase data and the current price.

Note that for stock transactions, you must enter the ticker symbol manually, but for currencies you can select from a list of major currencies.

One additional note, apparently MSN Money Central feels that Euro/Yen transactions need to be calculated in 100′s of Yen. As a result you’ll find that the cross rate for these currencies needs to be mentally moved 2 decimal places to the left. (e.g. 1.34 becomes .00134)

Now with all that good info in mind, I’ll share another wonderful tool with you.

EverBank.com allows account holders to purchase foreign currencies at spot rate plus a small transaction fee in an FDIC insured account. Base amount to establish an account is $2500 US, but account holders can move their savings between currencies within a single account to take advantage of forex opportunities, and still collect interest on the savings (for deposits of $10,000 or more). I think this is a wonderful idea. To learn more click here.

Happy Trading,

Tags: Currency :, Forex :

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under International Finance, Introduction to International Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.