by Charley Kyd on November 9, 2011
As a follow-up to the last two posts, I just thought of a way to compare performance to multiple Boolean (yes-no) conditions.
In an international company, for example, how can we visually interpret a chart of sales that could be affected by recessions in several major market areas?
Similarly, how could we visually evaluate the effects of several ad campaigns that often overlap?
This figure shows one way to do this:
This chart definitely gives us more information to think about. Notice that: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 8, 2011
When you look at a chart of long-term business performance, showing where recessions occurred often can help to explain the results…as this chart illustrates:
Here, Dell’s revenue fell considerably during the last two recessions. But Dell’s revenue problems pale in comparison to Caterpillar’s, as this chart shows: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 7, 2011
Most of the time, at least one of the major trading countries is in recession. The bottom row of this Excel figure summarizes this sad situation.
This figure has an important story to tell, whether or not your company trades internationally. Here’s why… [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 28, 2011
I’ve been working today on the Quick Start manual for KydWeb, which I still hope to introduce on Monday.
Originally, I explained how to write a formula that references a page at http://www.eia.gov to return historical data for the the average price of gasoline in US$.
But this evening, I made a great discovery. I stumbled across a site that offers historical prices for many commodities in many currencies. It only took me about two minutes to write formulas that returned prices in Euros for two yellow products, gold and bananas. So that’s what I’ll cover in the Quick Start Manual.
But because many Excel users would find the gasoline data useful, I’ll explain how to reference it here.
The US Energy Information Administration provides the monthly price of gasoline at this link. Here’s the top of their price-history table: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 22, 2011
This morning, I came across a political discussion in the Financial Modelling in Excel group at LinkedIn.com. The discussion was starting to generate more heat than light.
The discussion started with a link to this post at Business Insider: Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About…
One of the author’s charts showed that corporate profits are at an all-time high; another showed that wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. “In other words,” he wrote, “corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have.”
There are many ways to respond to that conclusion, but I thought it would be useful to measure wages and profits on the same scale to see what I could learn.
Using KydWeb, I loaded data from the following FRB series into Excel: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 21, 2011
When you’re planning for your company’s future, it would be great to have an accurate and current indication of how optimistic or pessimistic the public is about future economic performance.
The Conference Board, the University of Michigan, Rasmussen Reports, and others publish monthly surveys of consumer sentiment. Unfortunately, these surveys have at least two limitations from the perspective of many Excel users in business. First, they both charge a subscription fee for the data. And second, the data only is available monthly.
But there’s another way to learn what the public thinks about the economy, as shown here:
Here, the light blue jagged line shows actual index values, and the dark blue smooth line shows the general trend in thee values. I generated the data for the smoothed line using the KydWeb_Smooth function.
Here’s how this index works: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 21, 2011
Excel dashboard reports typically show internal data. But you can easily add public data that managers need.
Here, for example, is a modified version of Report 5 from IncSight DB. In the original version, the entire report showed internal data. But in this version, the nine small charts show web data of interest to Acme’s managers.
- Top Competitors: Row 1 shows actual revenue for Acme’s top competitors: Apple, Dell, and HP.
- Key Economic Data: Row 2 shows key economic data: the key currency exchange rate, the number of employees in its target market, and the Leading Index of Economic Indicators.
- Prices of Key Resources: Row 3 shows trends in the prices of key resources: gasoline, cardboard shipping containers, and electricity.
The data for these nine charts comes from [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 20, 2011
These days, it’s important to keep a close watch on the rate of inflation. This is because there’s a strong likelihood that inflation will sky-rocket when the economy starts to improve.
This chart tracks a company's unique rate of inflation. Because Excel formulas are linked to data maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the chart updates automatically after the data changes and the workbook is opened.
But which inflation rate should you monitor? The one for consumer purchases? The one for producer purchases? Perhaps you should monitor both.
But also, you certainly should monitor your own company’s private rate of inflation.
That’s right. Because your company buys different stuff than most other companies, and in different proportions, it has a unique rate of inflation. And that rate could be significantly higher or lower than the average rates of inflation discussed in the news.
It therefore makes sense to [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 19, 2011
When I worked for manufacturers, I always wanted to be able to analyze the long-term history of the financial statements of public companies. This information would have allowed me to answer at least five kinds of questions for my managers:
First, I had questions about the direction our largest customers and competitors were heading.
If their short-term financial history is weak or strong, has it always been that way? Or is this a new condition? Are their customers paying their bills? Is their inventory growing too fast? How’s their cash flow?
Second, I had questions about benchmarking our performance against our industry, or about our customers’ performance in their industries.
Do our own financial ratios [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 18, 2011
The FRED database is my favorite source of economic data.
Even though FRED (sometimes called FRED2) is offered by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, most of their data has nothing to do with banks. Instead, FRED offers a wide variety of economic data.
FRED has data about prices, employment and unemployment, exchange rates, banking, leading indexes, gross domestic products, interest rates, international data, US regional data, and more. It’s a great place to begin your exploration of economic data.
Although the FRB offers the ability to download workbooks with any of their data, I seldom use that feature. The workbooks take a lot of effort to download, manage, and use. And we must repeat that effort each time we need to update the data.
That’s why I [click to continue…]
