A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[SFSecurity]

Hi Clive, Like Winston Churchill said about America and Great Britain, "Two peoples divided by a common language." In this case the "language" is math and how we learned it.

You had, as one example,

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=^DJI Price	PC    #S     N =    Buy    Sell  
  American Express Company		 94.29	5000  53.03  94.29  81.99  110.93 

and I worked on a spreadsheet and could not come up with the figures you had for the Buy and Sell price. Scratched my head did the math on a four banger, and again pencil and paper. Then it suddenly dawned on me last night, when I woke up to take a bathroom break. It's great how one's mind continues to work on a problem even when we are asleep.

So I went back and re-read the basic formulas you used.

Okay, 115% of 100 is 115, right? And 15% off of 100 is 85, right? How I was taught to arrive at those answers was to multiply 100 by 1.15 to get a 15% larger number. I was also taught that one multiplied 100 by (1-0.15) to get a 15% reduction. Been doing it that way since I was a sprout.

So: A Sell would be at 115 for a stock was priced at 100
A buy would be at 85 for a stock priced at 100.

However the results are different if you divide 100 by 1.15 to get the buy price and divide by .85 to get the sell price.

100/1.15 = 86.956
100/.85 = 117.647

These would result in buying sooner on the down side and sell later on the up side. Different from the other way of doing the math but not necessarily bad.

You got the the buy for AMX at 81.99 and the sell at 110.93 while I got them at 80.15 for the buy price and 108.43 for the sell price.

I'll tell you what, we'll split the difference and do it your way for the sell price and my way for the buy price, deal?

Best to you and yours you hold most dear, now in the last hours of the day and thoughout the New Year.

Allen