Cartoon of the Day: Pie Chart

Mark Yockey on Wealthtrack

How to Automatically Include Stock Dividend Information in Google Docs

Microsoft, please pay attention to this article.  Excel 2013 is no better than any previous versions of Excel at automatically importing stock information which is why Google Docs has become my spreadsheet of choice.

Google provides a great stock market oriented function called GoogleFinance that is very easy to use.  For example, if an investor wants to retrieve a near real-time stock price into a Google Docs spreadsheet all they need to is include the function--- =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") or =GoogleFinance(B2, "price"), where cell B2 contains the ticker symbol.

The following types of real-time market data are currently available:

• price: market price of the stock - delayed by up to 20 minutes.
• priceopen: the opening price of the stock for the current day.
• high: the highest price the stock traded for the current day.
• low: the lowest price the stock traded for the current day.
• volume: number of shares traded of this stock for the current day.
• marketcap: the market cap of the stock.
• tradetime: the last time the stock traded.
• datadelay: the delay in the data presented for this stock using the googleFinance() function.
• volumeavg: the average volume for this stock.
• pe: the Price-to-Earnings ratio for this stock.
• eps: the earnings-per-share for this stock.
• high52: the 52-week high for this stock.
• low52: the 52-week low for this stock.
• change: the change in the price of this stock since yesterday's market close.
• beta: the beta value of this stock.
• changepct: the percentage change in the price of this stock since yesterday's close.
• closeyest: yesterday's closing price of this stock.
• shares: the number of shares outstanding of this stock.
• currency: the currency in which this stock is traded.

Notice that information on dividends is lacking from the list of options.  This is not a good thing if you are a dividend oriented investor.  Luckily, there is a relatively easy way to correct his oversight using either the google or yahoo finance web sites.

Current Dividend Yield

To obtain the current dividend yield of a stock, simply copy one of the two formulas into the cell in google docs where you want dividend yield to appear.

=REGEXreplace(REGEXextract(REGEXreplace(index (importhtml("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NLY&ql=1", "table", 3), 8, 2); "[()]"; "") ; "..[^a-zA-Z][.0-9].%$"); "[%]"; "") -- obtains dividend yield for NLY from yahoo finance

=REGEXextract(REGEXreplace(index (importhtml("https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABIP", "table", 2), 1, 2); "[()]"; "") ; "/([^/]*)") -- obtains dividend yield for BIP from google finance

Current Dividend Amount

To obtain the current dividend amount of a stock,  copy one of the two formulas into the cell in google docs where you want dividend amount to appear.  These sites are inconsistent in how they display dividends-- sometimes they show the quarterly dividend amount and other times the yearly amount.  So you might have to make the appropriate adjustments.

=REGEXextract(REGEXreplace(index (importhtml("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NLY&ql=1", "table", 3), 8, 2); "[()]"; "") ; "([^/]*) ") -- obtains dividend amount for NLY from yahoo finance

=REGEXextract(REGEXreplace(index (importhtml("https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABIP", "table", 2), 1, 2); "[()]"; "") ; "([^/]*)/") -- obtains dividend amount for BIP from google finance

A Word of Caution

If either site changes their layout, these formulas will have to be adjusted to compensate.

The Forbidden History of Terrible Taxes

The Face of Global Warming for AZ Golfers

Can someone point me to the first tee box?

How to Lose Money While Making Money

It takes a government to achieve results like this.

Quote of the Day: Maurice "The Grizz" Taylor

The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three....

I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!

Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour wage and ship all the tires France needs. You can keep the so-called workers....

How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.

~ Maurice "The Grizz" Taylor, Chairman and CEO of Titan International

Quote of the Day: Walter Williams

Gore Effect Strikes Global Warming Protesters in DC

The Gore Effect strikes once again at a major global warming rally. DC experienced its coldest temperatures of the year yesterday just in time for the protest (I swear there is a cosmic jokester out there somewhere getting a good chuckle out of all of this). These people were freezing their butts off wishing global warming were true.

Cartoon of the Day: Minimum Wage

About 2% of the 135 million people with jobs today earn the minimum wage or less. If the minimum wage is set too high, then younger and inexperienced workers never get a chance to work, because employers can't afford to hire someone that is expensive but has no experience or talents or a track record of success.

Quote of the Day: BIll Maher

Wow, what a shameless liar this Rubio guy is-- Obama created more debt than Bush? Well, if you don't believe in science, why not math too?

~ Bill Maher

Grouch: You can't make this stuff up..... I know he's just an entertainer, and entertainers have a short attention span and are easily confused, but let's give the mathematically challenged Bill Maher some help. Obama has created more debt in 4 years than any other leader in the history of the world. That's not just in the history of the US, but the history of the world. Last I checked $5.073 trillion in 4 years is greater than $3.294 in 8 years. Even the debt of both Bushes combined doesn't eclipse Obama's record deficits, and there's 4 more years of blowout spending yet to be accounted for. All you can say is-- Bill Maher, you are a dope.

Quote of the Day: John Mackey

Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.

~ John Mackey, co-author of the new book “Conscious Capitalism"

Life in the USSR -- the Worker's Paradise

Quote of the Day: Jerry Brown

Everybody with half a brain is coming to California.

~ Gov. Jerry Brown

Grouch: Keep dreaming. But on second thought I thinks he is right..... Only those with half a brain would move to CA these days..... gone are the glory days of the 50s and 60s.

The 21st Century Home of the Future as Seen from 1967

Living Room:


Home Office:


Kitchen:



The electronics all look rather analog to me, but not far off from reality with the overall vision, except in the kitchen.

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visualized on a Möbius Strip

Listen to the first canon from Bach’s Musical Offering, and you’ll hear what sounds like a simple beginning develop into what sounds like quite a complex middle. You may hear it and instinctively understand what’s going on; you may hear it and have no idea what’s going on beyond your suspicion that something is happening.

Bill Miller on Wealthtrack

Bill Miller is still one of the smartest guys in the room, though a bit more humble these days. His analysis of housing stocks, banks and future interest rates are fascinating and well worth the listen.

How's that Hugo Chavez Experience Working Out for the Average Venezuelan?

The average Venezuelan just lost 46% of their purchasing power with the government's recent currency devaluation. Ain't socialism great? Venezuelans can all grow poor together, except for Hugo and his cronies, of course.

The Latest Cialis Commercial

The Pessimists are Losing

In my mind, yet another argument for maintaining asset allocation. The experts have no clue where the market or individual stocks are headed. Maintaining an asset allocation based on your individual risk profile will enable you to capture all of the returns of the market, minus modest investment fees.

1936 Chevy Assembly Line Footage

Assembly line movements choreographed like ballet

How's that Electric Car "Investment" Working Out for Taxpayers?

From Reuters:

Are electric cars running out of juice again?

Recent moves by Japan’s two largest automakers suggest that the electric car, after more than 100 years of development and several brief revivals, still is not ready for prime time – and may never be.

In the meantime, the attention of automotive executives in Asia, Europe and North America is beginning to swing toward an unusual but promising new alternate power source: hydrogen.

The reality is that consumers continue to show little interest in electric vehicles, or EVs, which dominated U.S. streets in the first decade of the 20th century before being displaced by gasoline-powered cars.

Despite the promise of “green” transportation – and despite billions of dollars in investment, most recently by Nissan Motor Co – EVs continue to be plagued by many of the problems that eventually scuttled electrics in the 1910s and more recently in the 1990s. Those include high cost, short driving range and lack of charging stations.

The public’s lack of appetite for battery-powered cars persuaded the Obama administration last week to back away from its aggressive goal to put 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015.

The Administration has spent at least $5 billion on electric cars, with little to show for it. Unfortunately, the outcome was all too predictable. Politicians "investing" taxpayer money usually doesn't result in a happy ending.

My Favorite Super Bowl Commercial

Was the Summer of 2012 Really the Hottest Summer on Record?

'The summer of 1936 had more than six times as many 110 degree readings as the summer of 2012 – which didn't rank in the top twenty for hot summer afternoons'

via Climate Depot

"We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified...there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic.

‘The warming we have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.’

The Earth appears to have cooling properties that exceed the previous thought ones, and that computer models are inadequate to try to foretell a chaotic object like the climate, where actual observation is the only way to go."

~ Lennart Bengtsson

Markets in Everything: Kiosk Telehealthcare

From Gizmag:

Billed as a telehealth system, the HealthSpot Station is a telepresence kiosk designed to take pressure off a beleaguered health care system by providing a private area where acute care patients can speak to a physician over a high-definition video conference system.

It’s purpose is to act as an alternative to urgent care centers and emergency rooms while giving physicians a way to use their time more efficiently. There is an attendant on duty to answer questions and provide assistance and inside the kiosk is a suite of digital instruments to aid diagnosis, such as a pulse oximeter, blood pressure cuff, dermascope, patient touchscreen, video conference screen, otoscope and stethoscope. In addition, there are antibacterial surfaces and UV-C lighting.

HealthSpot sees the kiosk being used in a wide variety of locations including grocery stores, hospitals, doctors and specialists offices, emergency rooms, large businesses, rural communities, military bases, schools, nursing homes and remote villages in developing countries.

James Taylor - In Concert live at the BBC 1970

00:00 With A Little Help From My Friends 03:45 Fire And Rain 07:30 Rainy Day Man 12:18 Steamroller 15:38 Greensleeves 18:40 Highway Song 23:37 Carolina In My Mind 27:54 Long Ago And Far Away 30:20 Sweet Baby James 33:37 Riding On A Railroad 36:18 You Can Close Your Eyes (incomplete)

By 1970, Taylor had already endured a lifetime’s worth of formative troubles. He’d fallen into deep depression while still in high school, spent nine months in a psychiatric hospital, taken up and quit heroin, bottomed out and spent six months in recovery, underwent vocal cord surgery, taken up methedrine, gone into methadone treatment, had an album flop, and broken his hands and feet in a motorcycle wreck. Fire and rain indeed. But he’d also found favor with the Beatles, becoming the first American signed on their Apple label and recruiting Paul McCartney and George Harrison to play on his “Carolina in My Mind.” At the end of the sixties, the world at large didn’t know the name James Taylor, but his fellow musicians knew it soon would.

Grouch: I much prefer the early Taylor to the later Taylor, and the album he cut with Apple records remains one of my favorite Taylor albums.