QUOTE:
Saying that Excel is far more customizable than WLP can't be farther from truth but ... One has to possess some .NET developer skills to really "customize" many of its aspects.
I agree on both counts. WLP is much more customizable, but it does require some C# and .NET developer skills to get really fancy. But for
canned solutions (and there are some WLP
paired-trading strategy examples available for download), you don't need fancy programming skills.
One of WLP greatest features is its cache manager (part of Data Manager). Just like your web browser doesn't access the Internet directly, but goes through its own cache manager, so does Wealth Lab. Because of the unpredictable nature of the Internet, applications can't access data over the Internet directly in a reliable way; they instead need to go though a cache manager.
In contrast, Excel doesn't have its own cache manager. If you first download the stock data to disk, then let Excel access that data from disk, you should be fine. But if you're not using a disk or cache manager to "buffer" the data Excel is using, then there will be reliability issues, which you'll have to live with. That's why network applications (like browsers) cache their data.
Bottom line, I use both WLP and Excel. I do 97% of my stock stuff with WLP and 3% with Excel. I don't make any trade decisions with Excel, but I do evaluate which stocks should remain in WLP datasets with Excel periodically.
I previously used Excel for evaluating which stocks identified by the Fidelity stock screener (on their website) should be added to WLP datasets, but that's been replaced with a small command-line C# application, which is more turnkey.