This software has evolved gradually,
and from the beginning I had no intention to make this kind of
software.
A couple of years ago, I started to
invest in stocks. After some painful experiences from the
"buy-when-someone-recommends-a-stock"-period, I tried to be
more systematic. I wanted to rank the stocks after some key numbers
in order to automate the initial screening.
I created a spreadsheet document where
I entered some key numbers for stocks, such as dividends,
price/earnings, earning marigin, stock price, net asset value and
some more parameters. Updating those values by hand was a very time
consuming task, even for a very small number of stocks.
The next step was to experiment with
linking to external webpages in OpenOffice. I found that task very
time consuming too, as the incoming data spanned over different areas
each time – sometimes, that data occupied five rows, sometimes
seven rows. That brought a lot of work to adjust the spreadsheet.
Also, it took OpenOffice some two to tree seconds to fetch the data
(with a good internet connection).
The final step was to build a C++/Qt
program that downloaded the stock data, analysed it and sent it to a
csv file. My stockList spread sheet linked finally to that document.
Now, it takes my quite-slow-and-quite-old computer some 80 seconds to
download and update the stock information (12 data fields per stock)
of some 300 stocks.
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