Share Portfolio application now available on the Web.
July 2003
The first thing you may be asking yourself is why would you want to have a Share Portfolio published on the World Wide Web? The answer is - 'when you are managing a Share Club and individual members want to be kept up to date on trading and the current valuation of the Portfolio'.
If the members could be kept informed not only at the monthly meeting, but also during the month was a big plus for the Tavern Investments share Club. The 'club trader' had limited resources and was comfortable with the Excel worksheets that he had always been using. Thus, MS Excel had to be the starting point of the new model.
The Solution
Computer Craft proposed a solution that would publish the Share Portfolio, the Share Trading and the Cashbook from the Excel data source onto a web site.
To operate the system, all the trader has to do is ftp his Excel Spreadsheet onto the Web Site each time he updated the contents. And that was all he needed to do!
The Share Portfolio application reads the contents of the Excel Spreadsheet and reports the contents. Cash Book and Share trading was easy, but the Portfolio had to establish the current value of the shares at the time of publication.
Share valuation was achieved by screen scraping from other sites on the WWW. The application looks up a web site which publishes the current share trading stats and extracts from that web page the last sell amount. The amount is returned as a value and used to calculate the current value of the share holding.
The application can quickly move through all the shares in the portfolio in the same manner and value each line as well as an overall value for all the shares.
The application then goes further and calculates a Profit & Loss account. It takes into consideration the trading costs of a sell and the capital input of the individual members of the Club and can report a return on investment for each individual Club member.
The system has been a great hit with all the Club Members.
Technologies Deployed
The application is written in ASP.NET using the C# toolset. This solution has achieved 'Microsoft Windows Server 2003' certification.