Interesting New $50 Project - Excel as Tool for Investment Management

Tom from New Jersey recently requested a project involving the system of Excel spreadsheets that he uses to track and manage his investor clients' portfolios, as well as provide billing for his services.

He's using Smart Tags to retrieve current stock quote information (from MSN Money Central), but is having some trouble. MSN Money Central only lets him refresh the quotes every five minutes (per spreadsheet). This is somewhat problematic because if a single spreadsheet has more than one worksheet (for example, if a client has more than one IRA account, he might have them each in a different worksheet within the same spreadsheet) he has to wait five minutes between refreshing each client account.

Tom would like to know if there's some "master switch" he can throw to get all stocks in every worksheet updated, even if it's once per day, say at 6 pm or 9 am, or anytime. Further, he's looking for some kind of macro that would automatically open all of these files and refresh all stock quote info at a particular time. Further, he's spent a great deal of time developing his system and has around 200 of these worksheets, so any wholesale change -- like switching the source of his data from MSN Money, etc. -- would be very problematic.

This is going to be a fun one. I love investment-related projects. Makes me want to get my old day trading automator back out and dust it off...memories...

I'll keep you all posted.

BTW, my Excel_Geek Blog_Mail subscriber list keeps growing! I want to, again, pass along my humblest appreciation to all of you who make me feel as though what I'm doing really helps people. Thank you.