Forum Archive Index - December 2001

["Kevin Barclay" <kw.barclay@paradise.net.nz>]

As a beginning investor I made a mistake many months ago that was based
around inexperience and not "doing my sums". Having relatively smallish
amounts of capital available (ie <$1000) I bought some shares without
figuring in the cost of buy & sell brokerage, which you'll be aware starts
becoming a significant percentage of the total cost of trades costing under
$1000ish.

Also, the price of the shares & thus the quantity over which the brokerage
can be distributed also has an 'effect' on the actual cost of each
individual share, and therefore the amount that the value of the share must
increase before one may a) break even and b) actually make some money.

Being bitten once, I made a spreadsheet to bring these calculations to light
but have found the core functionality to be so static and useful, that I
have now written a small Microsoft Windows application which encapsulates
the exact calculations I wanted.

For anyone who is interested, I have place a zipped copy of this application
on the web page which also contains Gerry Stolywyks Spreadsheets (regular
readers may recall that I provided a website for Gerrys' spreadsheets, for
download by sharechat users). It is free and has no limitations on it.

You will find the application here (same for Gerrys Spreadsheets): it is
called sharecalc.zip and is 173kb in size (about 332kb when unzipped)

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/kwbarcla/shares/forum.htm

The application does the following:
-Accepts input of brokerage rates per trade (fixed not % based)
-Accepts input of your capital available (can be switched off & done by
volume)
-Accepts input of proposed share bid price
-Calculates and rounds quantity of shares able to be purchased
-Calculates actual cost per share in cents
-Calculates actual sell price to break even
-Calculates % change on original buy price required to sell and break even.
-Accepts your desired profit for the shares
-Calculates the actuak sell price to realise your desired profit
-Calculates % change on original buy price required to realise your desired
profit.

Brokerage can be selectively applied on buys and sells (to cater for IPOs
aand share buy-backs)

All calculations include brokerage costs (if applied) to give a 'real'
picture.

Feel free to use it. If anyone has suggestions/requests for improvement I'll
be happy to oblige where possible/practical.

(Tip:  use the TAB key to move quickly between input fields on the program.)

Regards
Kevin.


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