"I Love My MarketXLS"

"Who would have imagined the level of cash flow and asset appreciation I'm generating today."

There's an old saying: "The market speaks to you when you know how to listen." With the visibility and structure created through my MarketXLS spreadsheets, the market truly does speak. Patterns emerge. Pricing behavior becomes clearer. And the option premiums—organized by strike price and strike date—reveal exactly where traders are willing to buy or sell.

Maybe the traders are wrong sometimes. But trusting real market data over self-serving talking heads has always come naturally to me. When you know how to use spreadsheets, a new world of insight opens up.

This is the story of how I arrived at MarketXLS and the tools I built that now drive my results.

A Lifetime of Investing

I'm an entrepreneur in my seventies, and for more than fifty years I've invested in the market. Some years were up, some were down, but I kept contributing. As I began to slow down, it became clear that I needed a way to make my accumulated assets grow faster while generating more consistent cash flow.

That realization led me to option trading. Options generate cash, and more cash means more capital to reinvest.

The Search for Better Tools

There are countless free websites that let you look up option premiums, but none make it easy to compare strike dates and strike prices to determine which combinations pay best. I started manually entering data from webpages into spreadsheets. It worked—cash started flowing—but the process was tedious, time-consuming, and outdated the moment I finished.

After researching many solutions, I chose MarketXLS. I loved how their functions worked as simply as the built-in stock and history functions in Excel and Google Sheets. Real-time stock and option pricing, combined with more functions than I initially understood, made it the right choice.

My Three-Monitor Workflow

Today I work with three monitors. This setup gives me instant visibility into everything that matters:

The Workbooks I Built

Buy-Sell Options Workbook

Each row represents a single option with one of several statuses:

• Puts: Watch → Order → Option → Executed → Expired
• Calls: Watch → Order → Option → Executed → Expired

This workbook provides the transactional data that feeds other sheets and dashboards.

Stock Watch Workbook

This sheet updates real-time prices for my watch list and includes:

Option Grid Workbook

This is where the magic happens. The sheet displays stock and option pricing for one symbol at a time:

Always Improving

"You can't improve what you don't measure. With MarketXLS and the systems I've built, I now measure everything. And I'm looking forward to learning even more and improving my results further."