There's this contest (at some discussion forum) where participants start the year with $100K and buy and sell stocks or mutual funds (or whatever) and we see who does best by the end of the year.

>Are you involved?
Sure, I'll give it a go. It's fictitious money and it might be fun and I can try out various ...

>Who keeps track of the portfolio?
Aah, that's the reason for this tutorial.
I made up a spreadsheet so I could keep track of my own trading. It looks like this:

>Looks complicated!
How can it be complicated?
Every time you make a trade you just stick the info in columns A, B, C and D (starting at row 6). What could be simpler?
(namely the DATE and the Yahoo SYMBOL and the PRICE and the number of SHARES ... negative if you sell.)
The spreadsheet does all the rest.

Oh, I forgot. You should type in all the stock (or mutual fund) symbols you're interested in. That's the symbol LIST, in column K.

>Just the ones I buy or sell?
No. You type all the ones you're investing in as well as any others of interest.
Then you get on the Internet, click a button and prices are downloaded from Yahoo. They go into column O, automagically.
You can get your Portfolio value at any time throughout the day.

>It still looks complicated!
There's an "Explain" sheet. It looks like this:

>Okay, I'm game. How do I get ...?
Just click on the picture, or if that don't hardly work, you can RIGHT-click on the picture and Save Target.

>And there's a money-back guarantee?
Undubitably ...

P.S.
This spreadsheet may change from time to time ... so don't place too much stock* in the pictures above
'course, if you download the spreadsheet you'll get the latest version

*sorry