Making an Excel Stock Screener or Stock Tracker that grabs data from the Web?

[syrianrue]

Hi everyone!

I know the the basics when it comes to Excel, but what areas of expertise would I need to learn if I want to create a personalized stock screener or stock tracker that can display all the up to date data automatically or with a simple click of a button?

An excel sheet that automatically grabs market data from web sites or pdf, and fills them into the right cells for display or calculations.

Doing this manually for each stock has really taken a toll on me, so I was wondering if there's a way I can automate this painstaking process.

I have a degree in Computer Science, so even if I have to learn VBA it shouldn't be too much of a problem- however, could someone point me in the right direction? If so, is there a resource online you would recommend?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Johnnaz]

If you only need the price there is code to update a cell to the latest trade from Microsoft. Yahoo has an extensive (over 100) fields that can be downloaded using a VBA routine. Last price, open, close, highs, lows, etc. There are several modifications by different users that tweek the results even more. These are free downloads and easy to find on the net. Google also has a way to accomplish this by building a "My Portfolio" and then downloading. I am partial to the Morning Star option as I am a closed end fund guy and they support those investments better than others I have used. The have extensive calculations that save you the trouble of computing. The concept is the like Google's and does not use VBA. You create a portfolio and download as a CSV or .xls. I have found it easy and fast to extract with lookups the info I need from their sheet into a data sheet in my workbook. That allows me to have a "watchlist" in the download but only import the data for the securities I own. Hope this helps as it took me awhile to sort it all out for myself.