Excel is widely used by hedge funds and professional traders to manage trades, calculate P&L, compute buy and sell signals, and much more. These capabilities are available to the average trader, many of whom already use charting software to help with their trade strategies, often with limited success. Including Excel in your trading workflow process can deliver high value in terms of profitability, discipline and consistency. There are a few things you need to learn, but it is achievable with a little effort and the benefits can be very significant to your bottom line.
One of the first considerations is how you will use Excel for trading. Will you be importing price data into a spreadsheet? Will you track your positions, profits, and losses there? Do you intend to integrate it with an existing trading platform? Do you want to develop a complete Excel for trading system with VBA, charts, order entry, and such?
There are a variety of functional options you can go with. Stock and futures watch lists are popular. These can be quite elaborate with multiple prices, colors, positions, profits, losses, etc. Real time or end of day P&L reports can be built to track your performance across trades. Tracking portfolio performance and attribution is another use. A trading log where you record your trade decision steps, emotions and results on each trade can help develop discipline and consistency. The main uses for Excel in trading include signal generation, risk and trade management. Many of these data points can be charted to provide a “one look” view.
Excel for trading depends on data. Once that’s imported, what will you do with the data? Good options are watch lists, blotters, P&L statements, portfolio trackers, trade logs and heat maps. These can be used for intraday or historical analysis, trading performance, risk and trade management. Analytics like delta, drawdown, maximum adverse excursion, maximum profit realized or stop loss points can be calculated and displayed. There are unlimited uses of Excel for trading so feel free to let your imagination flow.
Best practices of Excel for trading involve planning your spreadsheet workflows and relationships so everything works together correctly and you can find what you need when you need it. You have a choice here of building a multiple spreadsheet environment or creating a single workbook with lots of tabs. The prior approach is modular and tends to work well because each separate workbook is for a specific purpose, small, and easy to manage. The downside is you may need to manage lots of links and Excel links have a tendency to break and get corrupted. Big workbooks with lots of sheets can be useful in Excel for trading since you have everything in one place. However, Excel tends to bog down and the files get huge when you start using more than 10,000 rows of data, charts, and multiple tabs together. It can also be a bit risky to have your whole daily trading operation in one file. Just make sure you back up your files in an external location every day!
Hopefully these concepts will be useful in kick starting your Excel for trading.
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