All Stacks Developer

Anyone using Google Sheets to manage stock portfolio investment must know how to use the GOOGLEFINANCE function to fetch historical prices of stocks. As I have used it extensively to manage my stock portfolio investment in Google Sheets , I have learned several best practices for using the GOOGLEFINANCE function that I would like to share in this post.

The 52-week range price indicator chart shows the relative position of the current price compared to the 52-week low and the 52-week high price. It visualizes whether the current price is closer to the 52-week low or the 52-week high price. In this post, I explain how to create a 52-week range price indicator chart for stocks by using the SPARKLINE function and the GOOGLEFINANCE function in Google Sheets.

Many functions in Google Sheets return an array as the result. However, I find that there is a lack of built-in support functions in Google Sheets when working with an array. For example, the GOOGLEFINANCE function can return the historical prices of a stock as a table of two columns and the first-row being headers Date and Close. How can I ignore the headers or remove the headers from the results?

After selling a portion of my holdings in a stock, the cost basis for the remain shares of that stock in my portfolio is not simply the sum of all transactions. When selling, I need to decide which shares I want to sell. One of the most common accounting methods is FIFO (first in, first out), meaning that the shares I bought earliest will be the shares I sell first. As you might already know, I use Google Sheets extensively to manage my stock portfolio investment, but, at the moment of writing this post, I find that Google Sheets does not provide a built-in formula for FIFO. Luckily, with lots of effort, I succeeded in building my own FIFO solution in Google Sheets, and I want to share it on this blog. In this post, I explain how to implement FIFO method in Google Sheets to compute cost basis in stocks investing.