Observations, Calculations, and Values
Obviously, with T-bills in the sub 1% range, it’s not mathematically impossible to earn double digit yields on cash balances in US dollars.
As I was reading a Financial Times article tonight about the Chinese economy, the following chart made me stop and wonder if maybe the Chinese Yuan wasn’t as fixed to the [...]
I like a good puzzle as much as anyone. The “Challenger” puzzle, aka the International crossnumber game, appears in the daily San Francisco paper.
To solve it, you have to fill the blank squares with the numbers 1 thru 9, so that the rows add up to the total at the right, the [...]
As I wrote about a month and a half ago, it’s news to just about nobody that the central banks of the world are expanding their balance sheets. But the scale of the Fed’s expansion left my eyes popped.
The below chart shows total Federal Reserve credit, which now stands at over $2 trillion, [...]
Part of the reason that I started this site was to publish some of the basic techniques and examples that I’ve developed over the year for working with data in spreadsheets. One prime example is interpolation. Excel gives you a =TREND function, and an =FORECAST function, but those run regressions, which is helpful [...]
Excel has a function called Data Tables can be very useful, since it allows you to insert live sensitivities into your model. Live sensitivities can be very useful, but can easily slow down a larger model. It’s not hard to copy and paste/special/values on a data table to speed things back up again, [...]
When a company is borrowing “From the Trade”, it’s usually not such a good sign. Here’s why:
When a vendor offers terms of 2/10 net 30, it means that the buyer receives a 2% discount for paying within 10 days, otherwise the balance is due within 30 days. It turns out that this [...]
Some people are content to use Quicken to manage their portfolios. I prefer keeping track of every little detail and see every calculation. So, I do it all the old fashioned way… in a spreadsheet. But getting an accurate read can be time consuming if you have to manually enter in stock [...]
Here’s a quick and easy way to get stock market quotes from Google, Yahoo, and Yahoo Japan into a spreadsheet. You just type=gq(”IBM”) for example, and the function goes out to google finance and pulls down the most recent quote.
Here are the functions are in the file:
Google
Name: =gname(”IBM”) returns the name of [...]
Microsoft Excel can’t do this. Google Spreadsheets can’t do it either.
Enter EditGrid, who allows you to publish a live spreadsheet to the web or to a blog. Above is a quick example of a mortgage function using their software. Most of the other online spreadsheets are wholesale knockoffs of excel. [...]