When I generate spreadsheets, all the calculations are built in. Then I got a neat spreadsheet from David where the calculations are made by the user.

>Huh?
You pick a bunch of stocks and download a year's worth of daily Open, High, Low, Close and Volume from Yahoo.
You decide upon which calculations you'd like to perform on the downloaded data, for each stock, and when all the stock data has been downloaded, you get a list of those calculations.

>Huh?
Okay ... the spreadsheet looks like this:

There's an Explain sheet which looks like this:

>And I can enter my own calculations?
Yes. You stick your magic forumulas in certain cells and those calculations get saved ... for each stock.

>Huh?
Yeah, like this:

Neat, eh?
>zzzZZZ
But you can decide yourself what you want to calculate. That's neat, eh?

>zzz ... huh ... how about the the whole list?
It's here   ... using ^GSPTSE as 'the market" (so we can calculate Beta).

Suppose we do the DOW and sort on the volatility. We'd get an ordering that looks like this:

See who's at the bottom of the volatility list? It's our friend the DOW.
That's because it's the volatility of the collection of all 30 stocks. Diversification, don't you see?
Of course, we're doin' the past year, from March, 2006 to March 2007. For the calendar year 1987, the year of the crash, the volatility was 34.5%.
Nevertheless, the DOW was near the bottom.

>And how about the S&P500?
Yeah, we could do that, too .... but I have the world's slowest internet connection, so I leave that up to you!

I should point out that the spreadsheet may change dramatically ... without notice.

P.S. The S&P 500 is here