Click Here To Purchase Microsoft Excel for Stock and Option Traders: Build Your Own Analytical Tools for Higher Returns

Author: Jeff Augen
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 978-0-13-713182-2

Microsoft Excel for Stocks and Options Traders is a book targeted towards individual investors who are interested in improving their chances of investment success by building on their analytical support for decision making through Excel.

Value of getting an information edge over other market participants is highlighted by way of various examples and how it is possible even for a small investors to discern patterns in the market that are more effective than traditional technical analysis indicators.

In the past several years, Microsoft Excel has improved in its capability and capacity to handle large data sets reliably and this is emphasized by the author in fingerprinting the market for seasonality and other events such as company earnings and data releases. The use of Microsoft Excel in graphical representation of price change relationships is also highlighted.

Using a case study on analyzing stock option expiration, the author shows the key steps in developing a thesis and getting a first cut of the trading strategy. Practical issues are dealt with while using SQL and Excel for storing, retrieving and analyzing data for uncovering statistical anomalies.

In the Basics section, there is a coverage of a wide variety of practical issues related to using spreadsheets and databases for storing and using data such as managing dates and aligning data records. There is full code example to demonstrate the record alignment of multiple tickers. The section also touches upon using decimal date conventions for options time to expiry and volatility calculations.

In the Advanced Topics section, the focus shifts to implementation details of technical analysis systems with large data sets in Excel. The author goes in depth through the process of building and testing a model and various useful Excel formulas. There is a full code example for trend reversal analysis which demonstrates both Excel functionality as well as the process of model building.

While the book does not recommend or favor any particular trading strategy, the framework provided should be very valuable for any individual investor who is interested in taking his/her investing strategy to a more rigorous data driven and risk controlled manner. Microsoft Excel for Stock and Option Traders is one book which could provide the reader with a solid skill set to achieve strong risk adjusted returns.

Jeff Augen, currently a private investor and writer, has spent more than a decade building a unique intellectual property portfolio of algorithms and software for technical analysis of derivatives prices. His work includes more than one million lines of computer code reflecting powerful new strategies for trading equity, index, and futures options.
Augen has a 25-year history in information technology. As a co-founding executive of IBM's Life Sciences Computing business, he defined a growth strategy that resulted in $1.2 billion of new revenue, and he managed a large portfolio of venture capital investments. From 2002 to 2005, Augen was President and CEO of TurboWorx, Inc., a technical computing software company founded by the chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Yale University. He is author of The Volatility Edge in Options Trading (FT Press, 2008), The Option Trader's Workbook (FT Press, 2008), Trading Options at Expirations (FT Press, 2009), Day Trading Options (FT Press, 2009), and Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Much of his current work on options pricing is built on algorithms for predicting molecular structures that he developed as a graduate student.


Click Here To Purchase Microsoft Excel for Stock and Option Traders: Build Your Own Analytical Tools for Higher Returns