Excel Exercise #5: Stock Market Index,Valuation, Earnings+Conditional Formatting

Narrator: Welcome to exercise number five. Now, it's important for you to note that we're going to learn by doing, rather than me giving you lectures on 'what is a stock market?', and that sort of thing. We're going to actually analyze data and learn about the stock market by doing these exercises. So please complete all the exercises, if you can, for the next couple sections at least, where we talk about stock market and portfolio management. It's important that you do these exercises so that you understand, in more detail, how to navigate and customize the Portfolio Dashboard. Okay? Which I provided you with, and we'll be talking a lot about. Okay, and what I mean by that is, on the Portfolio Dashboard there's a lot of conditional formatting, which appears down here in question number 12 here, okay. So, on the Portfolio Dashboard, there's a ton of stuff that we can analyze. But I really want you to understand, not only how to make it by following these exercises with me in Excel, but also listening to me explaining the business concepts and logic behind a lot of the information we're going to be analyzing. In this exercise, we're going to talk a lot about the SNP 500, and the SNP 500 is an index of 500 stocks in the United States that represent the broader US markets or US economy, okay. Other countries have their own indexes, in Canada it's the TSX, in Germany it's the DAX, in France it's the CAC 40 or the CAC Quarante. There there's other indexes in other countries as well. So, we'll also talk about earnings here, from a high level perspective, and the average company in the SNP 500, how much they make, what does price earnings mean, we'll analyze the data and look out for spikes and understand why we saw spikes in certain years. It's important to follow through on all these exercises, please. So that, again, when we make or customize our Portfolio Dashboard today, in future lessons or in the future whenever, you'll have a better understanding of stock market concepts, again we're going to learn by doing. So let's talk about what we're going to learn, in this exercise. There are 12 questions in this exercise, it's a pretty long one, and I'm going to introduce you to a lot of stock market concepts in this lesson, and we're going to be analyzing data from the SNP 500, and then what we'll be doing is, we will analyze the valuation of companies in the SNP 500. We'll also make a couple charts, I'll teach you how to format cells, and do what's called Conditional Formatting, which is a lot of fun. It looks actually, like this. I think you'll enjoy it. So please read the question first, and try to come up with the answer yourself. If you need a hint, read this cell here, and if you need a lot more help, you're not understanding the answer, you can actually click over here to watch a video explanation of the answer or what you can do is, after you've finished this entire exercise, you can just skip on to the next lecture in the course, where I'll discuss the answers to all of the questions. There's a lot of stuff that we're going to cover in these Excel exercises over the next couple sections, that will make a lot more sense when you look at the Portfolio Dashboard which you can customize yourself. As a reminder, the Portfolio Dashboard is called Portfolio Dashboard dot X L S, it's in Excel, and it's saved as a resource to download in the first section of this course. Again, a lot of this stuff will make more sense once we finish the next couple of sections in this course. There's just a ton of data you can access in this Portfolio Dashboard, which I'd love for you to customize, thank you.