There are many free tools available to help people manage their stock portfolio. For example, you can use Yahoo! Finance to track your current holdings. For each stock it list many detail financial data as well as stock chart for various periods. Still, when you need to do more sophisticated analysis, there is nothing that beats the power of spreadsheet.

Fortunately it is easy to pull the data from the web tool to a spreadsheet. You can simple copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet to get a properly formatted table. For there you can add your custom formula or charts. The problem is unlike the web view, data downloaded on a spreadsheet is not updated with current market information. On the other hand if you download the again you will lose all custom formula you have added.

To get the best of both world, I have created a script to so that you can update your spreadsheet with the latest stock quote from the web. This is a simple Python script. It first looks for the stock symbols in your portfolio in your spreadsheet. It then fetches the (15 minute delayed) stock quote from a Yahoo web services. Finally it updates the cells in the spreadsheet with new data from Yahoo.

This tool requires Python 2.5, Excel and pywin32 extension. Click here to download the stock quote update script.

2008.06.22 [python] - comments