The most important change is how much data is now available to us for free and more is coming all the time. To harness this data takes having a tool that can both go and get the data and then can be used to analyze the data. Fortunately most of us already have this tool, it is called Excel.

I used to manually gather and input data into Excel but a couple of important discoveries made data collection a much easier thing to accomplish. First I ran into Bonnie Biafore's wonderful book called "Online Investing Hacks" and it was here I learned the value of doing Excel Web Queries as well as a number of other things. Although originally published a number of years ago, it is still available and I noticed it is even available as a Kindle book.

A few years after Bonnie's book I was looking at the BIwiki on spreadsheets ( http://biwiki.editme.com/Spreadsheets ) and I discovered the SMF_Addin. This has really empowered my Excel spreadsheets. The SMF-Addin was developed and is maintained by Randy Harmelink. It was all available and discussed as part of a Yahoo user group that is free to join. The Group is not surprisingly called "smf_addin". Recently Randy has been porting the files for smf_addin over to a separate site that he maintains called " http://www.ogres-crypt.com/SMF/ ". The discussion area is still over in the Yahoo group.

Now I know that building spreadsheets is not for everyone but I can tell you that if you enjoy that kind of challenge then you can build investing tools that are much better than anything you can buy out there. They can gather and analyze the things that are important to your investing style no matter whether you are a fundamental investor (which I believe have the best track records) or a technical investor. The SMF_Addin can literally automate the retrieval of thousands and thousands of pieces of data from most of the websites we are used to looking at as well as some that are new to us.

I have tried sharing my spreadsheets but Web Queries and even the SMF_addin requires some amount of "maintenance" which I do for my own tools but is something that can be very time consuming to keep up for free shared files.

I hope this helps for those that are interested in "playing".

Paul Madison