Question: I want everyone to go to Yahoo.com (or any other web site you may presently utilize to track your investments) and establish an account under the "finances" option.

In this account you established, I want you to list the current mutual funds and stocks you own, or those you would consider owning in the future. I want you to pull the data on one of these investments in months for the past 24 months.

Then, I want you to start an Excel spreadsheet called investments. Set this spreadsheet up in the following format:

The second column, labeled coding, is just the number of the month you are tracking. This makes the math much easier to work with in Excel. The third column is the price of the investment on the last day of the month. Yes, you can do this by day - but - you have to do it by day-every day of the year.

I also track the DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P (this would mean three more columns across the top) because certain investments react to one of these, but very seldom all of these.

Now, using the chart wizard, create scatter diagrams for all of the dependent variables (price, DOW, NASDAQ) based on the independent variable - coding (date). Does your investment follow the DOW, NASDAQ, or the S&P? Based on the last 24 months, what do you expect your investment to do in the next 6 months? How about the next year?