Hey folks, happy June to you all!
I figured it was time to say hi to you again and let you know the updates with Don't Quit Your Day Job... – and, per tradition, updates on our home projects (ha).
Before we dive into the updates, I want to take a moment to wish all the dads on our list a very Happy Father's Day. I'm spending the weekend at my parents' house – yes, with my daughters in tow – so please understand if my responses to replies to this Weekender are a bit delayed.
We've got NASDAQ...
Longtime readers know I have been striving to find reliable stats on the NASDAQ's history for... well, roughly forever. Officially, I may have first promised a NASDAQ version in 2012.
If you missed it, earlier in the Spring, I finally found what I needed to create a NASDAQ Return Calculator. Yes, don't worry, it also includes dividend reinvestment.
Yesterday, I also finished the Historical Return Calculator tool for the NASDAQ. (It's something I built for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500, as well).
It's an information-dense tool. You define periods in months and years, and it computes the investment return over all rolling periods in its dataset (here, since 1973—longer in the other tools). It then presents summary statistics on those periods and graphs the returns in order.
I've had some complaints about the writeups for this tool on the other indices, and I want to make sure you are confident interpreting the output. I have some marked-up screenshots in this one explaining how to read some of the stats. Please let me know what you think, and if it works out, I'll incorporate this style of explanation into the older ones.
We've got cryptocurrencies...
You know DQYDJ for the return calculators, and I'm proud of the ones I've built. However, I recently hit a snag on a bunch of my calculators that used NASDAQ Data Link*.
They made a breaking change to their API, locked my account out while I was testing updates(!), and won't respond to my emails to unlock my account. Anyway, for one replacement API, I'm trialing CoinGecko, and am so far pretty happy.
Scrolling to the "Commodity and Cryptocurrency Returns" section of the Investing category page, you'll find several new calculators. There, I fixed the Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin return calculators and now added support for Dogecoin, Cardano, Avalanche, Shiba Inu, Solana, and Chainlink.
Further, I built four other tools (which I expanded for all nine cryptocurrencies)—tools to convert to and from dollars on a date in the past, along with some new Daily Moving Average and Historical Drawdown analysis tools.
These are new tools for me, but if you like them, I'll expand them to other securities. They should work for indices like the S&P 500, as well as individual ETFs, mutual funds, and stocks.
(Your feedback is appreciated before I put any work into those, haha.)
* I'm still looking for an API for historical precious metal prices. Paid is fine, as long as it's reasonable – I want to offer tools for free as long as I can. I need to fix my gold, silver, platinum, and palladium price return calculators, to start.
We've got home projects...
As I told you in other weekenders, our house is great but needs (or, in many cases, needed) some work. Here's a recent action photo:
The joists under the kitchen – 2x8s on a 12' span – were sagging up to 5/8" in the middle. I sistered them with 2x8s and LVLs. It's much better now - and the glasses stopped rattling so much when someone walks through!
Before winter, I'd love to do something similar under the upstairs bathrooms. And I need to do something about the surface of the deck. And...
Thanks for reading, we'll talk again soon!
