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Monday, January 07, 2008 11:04 AM

Book review: The Halo Effect

When I read " Built to Last ", " In search of excellent " and " Good to great " I immediately thought: "What a bunch of BS!!". But again, I think that about most business books. The content of these books seemed particularly ludicrous to me. I found both
Posted by lucabol | 5 Comments
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Monday, December 17, 2007 3:17 PM

Bisection-based XIRR implementation in C#

Here is a quick implementation of XIRR (using Excel nomenclature) written in C#. Disclaimer : this is a super simple Bisection-based implementation. People tend to prefer the Newton method, but this is simpler and works for the app I'm writing. I decided
Posted by lucabol | 1 Comments
Friday, August 31, 2007 1:43 PM

Parsing QIF Quicken files in C#

I'm slightly prouder of the structure of this code than the one in the previous blog post . You can simply inherit from QIFParserBase and override a couple of abstract methods to customize the behavior. Still, I just tested it on a couple of test QIF
Posted by lucabol | 1 Comments
Attachment(s): ParseQIF.zip
Thursday, August 30, 2007 1:25 PM

Retrieve prices, dividends and splits for a stock in C#

I wrote this code very quickly and I'm kind of ashamed of it, but it gets the job done (I think). You need the HTML Agility Pack for the stock splits retrieving code. You can download it from here or you can simply comment out the code. I wrote it against
Posted by lucabol | 0 Comments
Attachment(s): PriceRetriever.zip
Friday, April 20, 2007 11:55 AM

A financial education (my ideas)

When I came to US, I wanted to get an introduction on personal finance. I needed to know what to insure, when, how to buy an house and all this sort of basic things. At the time I read Personal Finance for Dummies . I then discovered that very many US
Posted by lucabol | 5 Comments
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Friday, February 02, 2007 10:26 AM

A good Emerging Market fund

If you are looking for a good fund for this corner of your portfolio, you might want to consider Eaton Vance Structured Emerging Mkt (EAEMX). There is also a much cheaper version (EITEX), but it is open just to folks with a financial advisor. It is a
Posted by lucabol | 1 Comments
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Thursday, January 04, 2007 2:53 PM

A trading/portfolio management Excel Add-in based on the books by Ralph Vince

This one is an Excel add-in that adds functions to Excel to analyze your trading and manage your portfolio. Notice that I'm not a professional trader or statistician, so the whole thing could be wrong, buggy or conceptually absurd. Probably it is all of the above. I used the extremely good ExcelDna to write the add-in. You need to download it and follow the instructions in HowToInstall.txt on the attached zip file to use it. I based the formulas mainly on the work of Ralph Vince. Please buy and read his books on money management as they are wonderful.
Posted by lucabol | 2 Comments
Attachment(s): TradingLibrary.zip
Wednesday, March 09, 2005 12:01 PM

To rent or to buy a house, some more evidence of my unpopular thesis ...

I discussed this topic in a previous post http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/archive/2004/07/30/202394.aspx and I received a number of emails telling me how crazy I was even speculating that, at the current juncture, it may be more convinient to rent than
Posted by lucabol | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004 12:13 PM

"Rent or buy" spreadsheet

Someone asked me for the spreadsheet I used for the calculations in my previous posts. Here you have it. The data doesn't reflect my current situation. Feel free to use it with your own numbers (and tell me of any bug).
Posted by lucabol | 1 Comments
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Monday, August 02, 2004 12:57 PM

I'm buying a house...

I think I've been misinterpreted in my previous posts. I'm not suggesting that renting is better than owning. You have to run your numbers and make your own choice. There are many assumptions to consider (financial and not). The not financial ones often
Posted by lucabol | 1 Comments
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Friday, July 30, 2004 11:06 AM

To rent or to buy a house??

Spurred by some comments to a previous post I quickly run these numbers. They analyze the case of house price not rising in the next five years. I’ll take more time to check them if I really get to a point of deciding, but they should be correct.
Posted by lucabol | 20 Comments
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Thursday, July 29, 2004 9:10 AM

My quest for a new home...

I’m refining my understanding of how to value residential properties. There is this rule of thumb: buy when you can get a rent for the property which is at least 1.2% of the property price (or in another form, when the home price is 7x the annual
Posted by lucabol | 10 Comments
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004 8:56 AM

Book: "The coming crash in the housing market", John R. Talbott

My wife and I are planning to move somewhere where you can walk to shops and restaurants. We were thinking about selling or renting our current suburbia home. So, as usual, I picked up a bunch of books from the local library. This is one of them. Amazon
Posted by lucabol | 4 Comments
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