Option Calculator for Excel

As an investing strategy I like to sell covered call options to generate income, effectively enhancing the dividend yet capping the potential gain. Covered calls are generally effective in a flat to moderately bullish stock market.

The Blue Collar Investor is a great place to learn about covered calls, but that's not what I'm writing about today.

It can be time consuming to figure out the potential return on an option so I put together a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to automate the process. There are two tabs in the spreadsheet.

The Stock tab is where you enter the stock and commission pricing. After you enter the stock symbol and press enter web queries are made automatically. The data comes from Yahoo!.

The Options tab displays the option pricing. Cell A1 indicates the month and B1 indicates the year. That's all you should touch on this tab.

The spreadsheet should continue to work until Yahoo! redesigns their option page, but since a redesign recently occurred this shouldn't be an issue for some time.

Blogger doesn't allow me to post a file so I've uploaded it to another server.
http://www.3dcgi.com/option-calculator-mini.zip

I hope you enjoy it and happy investing.

Invasion: Repel & Rebuild

A number of years ago a friend and I remade the classic arcade game Rampart in 3D. The gameplay has elements of Missile Command and Tetris. Unless you're really good each game is fairly short.

You can download it for free at zmgames.com. The rendering engine uses OpenGL and the source code is included.

Learn C++ Programming

"SAMS Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes" by Jesse Liberty is a great introduction to C++ and as you become more advanced you can find detailed coverage of the topics online. Stack Overflow is a good Q&A site for programmers.

I first read "SAMS Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes" around 10 years ago and as an occasional C++ programmer I still find it to be useful when I need to review C++ features I haven't used in a while.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to share some tools that are useful to me and might be useful to others. A college professor was fond of saying "any job is easy with the right tools." This saying stuck with me, hence the name of this blog.