How do you access financial data like stock portfolio using MS Excel?

I know a couple of ways. I describe two of them.

First Method:

Excel has a built-in data type called Stock that you can use.

StockDataType-0.png

This allows you to do most things with the stock portfolio.

Details here:
https://hodentek.blogspot.com/2020/05/three-easy-steps-to-work-on-your-stock.html

Although you can get most information of a stock, still some data such as 'dividned' is not available. Microsoft may change and add this as well.

Second Method:
It is easy to import financial data from a site such as Yahoo. The following steps show with step-by-step screen shots how you may get the data in the Yahoo's web page. The next screen shown uses the ribbon to get data from WEB.

In the URL type in the Yahoo URL for the Quote page filtering MSFT (Microsoft).

Click OK and you may need to wait it out.

Stick with anonymous. That's OK. I

In the above, click Connect.

 Well. have patience.

The Navigator shows up.

All that remains is for you to choose the data in the web page.

The following are the ones for Document, Table1, Table2 and Table 3.

Table 2 has the Dividend information.

Which one do you want CEO or CDO?

What we more importantly need is a CDO.

CDO is Chief Data officer(DBA in disguise?) who can mesmerize your customers with the infinite possibilities of data analytics.

Well, you also need a CAO, the Chief Analytics Officer.

Here is a play on the anagrams from Gannet.

Microsoft has done quite well, don't you think?

Cloud and Big Data has made a lot of changes...

Big Data exposure with Oracle and Microsoft

The above title and the below paragraph is from the following link:
http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/07/oracle-corporation-orcl-launches-big-data-sql/

"Moerdler rates Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) as Outperform, giving it a $49 price target (currently $41) based on a 12-month adjusted EPS estimate of $3.58, a 13x PE multiple, and adding back in net cash per share discounted by 30%"
Current: $50.14 (7/2/2017)

"He also argues that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a good Big Data play, rating it Outperform and giving it a $56 price target (currently $43.50), because he believes management is heavily focused on mobile and cloud products and that EPS growth is going to pick up as the company moves its focus away from the slowing PC market"

Current: $68.93 (7/2/2017)

After a 3 year period of many political and economic changes Microsoft seems to have outformed Oracle which may be attributed to its all out effort and emphasis on Cloud Services not withstanding its PC and Phone performance.

Analyzing stocks with Microsoft Excel

This appears to be a new thing that Excel is supposed to do. It is really
Business Analysis, and I was just curious to see how much intelligence can
be gathered and how interactive the application. It uses the GET and TRANSFORM
features of EXCEL. Get started with Power Pivot to reap the benefits.

This program came with my Office 365 subscription and I was encouraged to
take the tour. Here are some images of my tour. It only worked partially. When
I added a third stock symbol, it could not come up with an anticipated response.
I think it is still in the works! More can be found on Excel Team blog.

This is what you would see after launching EXCEL2016 from its shortcut.

Click on Stock Analysis

Click Create.

 Click My Stock Analysis. It comes up with a two default stocks, their performance over a number of years as well as a chart. The application is supposed to allow you enter one more NASDAQ stock.

 I tried a couple of them like XOM, AAPL, GOOGL, etc. It asks for privacy information as shown in the next. For both option choose, PUBLIC and it should allow the third stock to enter

I could change the default stocks but the third stock did not work as expected. The charts, I suppose is no more relevant.

As I said earlier, it is still in works. It could become a great tool in the future.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are all smiling today

Here is an after hours status of the three companies stocks. Important to note that cloud business as well as search related business is prospering. What the Street calls, 'Big Techs, Big beats'

Amazon all time high today.

After hour links:

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/after-hours

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/googl/after-hours

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/after-hours

Research in Motion goes for Microsoft's exFAT

This deal will be one of several taht Microsoft signed with others such as, Panasonic, Sony and Cannon (all Japanese). The motivation for RIMM is to be able to face Apple and Google squarely in the face and of course it aligns with Microsoft's wish as well.

exFAT created for flash drives has better specs than the FAT system (which is not all that fat, could not stiffle the pun) in terms of file sizes (32 exabytes vs 32GB), formatting size, files in a directory limits all eliminated. Vista was not popular but exFAT was made its debut in Vista SP1. You may ask why not NTFS but NTFS has overheads for its special structure not suited for a small footprint.

exFAT is not just for Microsoft windows you can use it on MAC as well for models later than with SnowLeopard (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2790170?start=0&tstart=0)

Well, good luck to you RIMM.


Get a some more tech info here:
http://www.on-time.com/rtos-32-docs/rtfiles-32/programming-manual/in-embedded-applications/

Of course there is a lot on Wikipedia as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
 

Samsung courts Windows 8 Phone

The talking heads on CNBC were all talking about it. Looks like Windows 8 is drawing more admirers. Samsung has unveiled Ativ S with Windows 8 (related story here: http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0831/Samsung-unveils-the-Ativ-S-the-first-ever-Windows-8-phone)
I have a Windows 7 Samsung' Focus and I will get a Windows 8 when it becomes generally available.

Can it beat the Android handsets? You bet, I am confident that it will. Microsoft stocks as well as that of Nokia will go up in a matter of mere 2 months. If you do not own them, now may be the time.

The new phone has a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and an 8-megapixel rear camera paired with a 1.9-megapixel front-facing one. The phone will come in 16GB and 32GB flavors. It's 8.7mm thick.

Read the 10  things that Windows 8 phones does better than iPad here including how Internet Explorer 10 will best the Chrome:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0305/Ten-ways-Windows-8-outshines-the-iPad/1.-Windows-8-is-More-Personal-Than-iOS

HP dumps SQL Server and picks up MySql

HP seems to be courting Oracle; it's one time bitter foe, by choosing Oracle's MySQL (it's not Oracle's original stuff but was part of Sun Microsystems suite which it acquired in 2010) over SQL Server. This reminds me of the famous quote (I forgot to who it must be attributed) that, "there are no friends, no enemies, but eternal interests".

Why did HP do it? Perhaps MySQL’s adoration by the Open Source developers (it's really poor man's RDBMS compared to MS SQL Server's and may cost a lot less than SQL Server) and by those with smaller budgets. Perhaps, HP wants to motivate the investors to make bets  (see chart below), or perhaps there are more small scale players using Amazon Cloud with MySQL as their backend choice testifying to its popularity with small scale implementations which really do not care for bells and whistles that SQL Servers offers, or perhaps Oracle, Amazon, HP ganging up to beat up Microsoft. In any case, one cannot be sure of one's friends or one's enemies.

However, SQL Server which has a totally integrated BI suite, awesome synchronization capability spanning oceans, and with its excellent security features will not be abandoned by big time players. May be we should revisit the below chart in a year's time.

More of this story here and here.

What is common to Microsoft, Ford and Diabetes?

We are entering the next phase in human industrial evolution by bringing in health monitoring into our most cherished and useful device, the car. Ford is now equipped with devices to check the blood sugar count and advice the driver appropriately to take a sugar pill if the sugar falls below a certain level. A reduced sugar count implies a negative effect on driving ability. Well this is where Microsoft comes in with its Voice-activated communication system synced to Ford. May be Ford should also provide a pill delivery system. This is good especially for emerging countries, most specifically India, the largest producer and consumer of sugar with perhaps the largest number of diabetics in the world.

If this is possible why not eliminate drunken driving altogether by stopping the engine when it detects traces of alcohol. I am not sure which is the biggest killer, Sugar (the lack thereof)  or alcohol.

Read full story here;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/ford-sees-sales-surge-with-new-diabetes-to-heart-dashboard-cars.html?cmpid=yhoo

Microsoft Trading Platform on your desktop

Microsoft is partnering with Saxo Bank of Denmark to offer a trading platform according to Financial Times (FT) launching tomorrow. I hope this investment bank known for its success in internet brokerage (according to WikipediA) provides the proverbial Midas Touch to Microsoft's various products and thereby its share holders (disclaimer: I don't own MSFT stocks).

Highlights

Trade over 11000 stocks On 23 world exchanges
Fundamental Analysis
Powerful stock screener
Diversify  risk Management etc.

Perhaps early next year a trading platform on the cloud!!!

Office 365 coming to a cloud near you

Microsoft's star product Microsoft Office gets launched to the cloud soon as Office 365.

Summary of what is offered:

Microsoft's star product Microsoft Office gets launched to the cloud offering the following services:

• Office Professional Plus

 Accessible from all hardware platforms-PC, Phone and Browser

• Exchange Online

 All your emails, calendar and contacts with anti-virus and anti-spam features

• Sharepoint Online

 All sharing between colleagues, partners and customers

• Lync Online

 Instant messaging, video conferencing, online meeting etc.

Key benefits of Office 365 (according to MSFT):

• 24/7 IT-Level Phone support

• Get up and run faster with migration tools

• Server patching, updating all gone

• Variable pricing to fit your pocket

Will Intel's Cloud Builders program lift it out of its lows?

Watching Intel stocks for the past 10 years I have seen it mostly going down although it seems to be coming back. But as a believer in Cloud Technology, I imagine that the Cloud Builders program will make the Cloud 2105 (Simplified, Secure and interoperable, mother of all clouds) vision a resounding success. However the task appears formidable given the number of players in the business and their idiosyncrasies.

 

Copied from Yahoo Finance on 10/28/2010

The idea of this vision is to optimize resources across the cloud providers, a growing list that includes some 20 stakeholders,
Canonical
Cisco
Citrix
Dell
EMC
Enomaly
Eucalyptus Systems
Gproxy
HP
IBM
Intel
Joyent
Microsoft
NetApp
NetSuite
Novel
Parallels
RedHat
Univa
VMWare

With all these folks committing resources, ideas, and practical guidance this vision may come true. Will this improve the bottom line?