Disclaimer: The method explained herein to track your stock, should not be used for daily transactions, as the quotes retrieved from the internet are delayed by couple of minutes.
Many of us have invested our life savings in the stock market. And the giants have already eaten into our savings, after promising us good returns. But we are the only ones to be blamed for our loss, because each time we invested, we were taking a “calculated risk”.
Anyway, this topic is not for crying about our losses. It explains one more way how we can track our stock. We all have created portfolios on sites like moneycontrol or BSE website. But all of this sites require us to login before we can access our portfolio and find out how much we have lost at that point. There are many finance management software, but they might be bit difficult to navigate. One easier way, which avoids login each time, is to create the portfolio in spreadsheet(Oh!! What happened to this good old word, spreadsheet. I still remember Lotus 1-2-3, and the revolution it started. It was a killer application). But we are not going to use Lotus 1-2-3 or even the costly excel program. We will use sun’s office suite, openoffice, and specifically openoffice calc.
We require the latest version of openoffice.org, 3.2.1. For those who do not have it installed on their PC, download it here, and do consider using it, since it is a comprehensive office suite, competing head on with MS office. And best of all, its free to download and distribute. Once installed, you need to download an extension, GetQuote, from its extension repository.Once downloaded, open up Openoffice.org application that you have installed. Go to Tools—–>Extension Manager. Click Add and select the downloaded file. This will install the extension, and you are all set to create your portfolio on spreadsheet.
Open a new Openoffice.org calc spreadsheet. Check out the short code used on yahoo finance for your stock script. For example Assam Company on Bombay stock exchange is given by ASSAMCO.BO. Jindal Drilling on National Stock exchange is given by, JINDALDRI.NS. So on you can get the stock codes. Now to get a stock quote in a cell, type =GETPRICE(ASSAMCO.BO). Once you press enter, it will immediately connect to yahoo finance and display the live price to you. Same goes for all other scripts.
Your can use your spreadsheet knowledge to format the display in a more presentable way. Check out the screenshot of an example.
Though a bit tedious initially, once you have created it, there won’t be any changes required, and no logging in each time you want to see your investments in stock.