I received an email from a "Stock Trading Riches" reader who had a question about the spreadsheet (it is a free download for people who buy the book, in either format - paperback or kindle).
His spreadsheet question was:
In the "number of shares" column I notice that you are checking for a 10% price change between the current years price and the previous years price. This is ok in Year 1 and Year 2 but in the longer term you are not comparing the current years price to the initial Year 1 price. So what could happen is you could have a steady increase/decrease of less than 10% every year over a number of years (cumulatively > than 10% over a number of years) but none of them will trigger any selling/buying as the price is being compared to the prior year. Was the sheet deliberately designed this way?
My answer was:
What the basic system does in real life is only rebalance if the stock has moved 10% or more from the last time it was rebalanced. So, the spreadsheet should actually not compare the current and previous values, or the current and first. Instead, it should compare the current value with the last value where a rebalance occurred.
I don't know how to do that in Excel. So, I put the 10% check between the current and previous row just in case a value isn't 10% apart. But the best way to use the spreadsheet is to manually exclude prices less than 10%.
So, if the monthly prices were 100, 99, 95, 97, 85,... you would put in 100, 85 in the spreadsheet.
