The spreadsheet calculates relative strength.

An Excel spreadsheet would calculate the weakness or strength of an item today relative to its strength when it was purchased.

The spreadsheet would contain research about a large number of ratios. In the beginning, you would have just a small number of ratios including things that were important to you personally. You would know about your own labor hours, your own rent, your own electric bill and grocery bill, and all that. You would know the cost of the things that you personally care about.

A larger spreadsheet would have lots and lots of research containing hundreds of ratios of things that you personally might not need. You would have lists of hundreds of commodities, like coal, copper, wheat, that kind of thing. You could be more specific and less specific. There would be an acre of land in Tasmania, and an acre of land in California, in the year 1999. You'd get very specific after a while, with lots of research.

The spreadsheet would calculate a lot of things automatically and it would give you a signal or a warning to tell you that it was time to buy or sell a particular thing because you REALLY ARE making a profit on that right now.

You could set up the computer to automatically spider lots of websites to gather this information about how much things cost right now. You would do this for years and years and years.

Every time you bought or sold something, it would be given a tag automatically, which would point you to all the ratios that existed at the time when it was bought or sold. All of the tags would be stored on the spreadsheet.

And, as I said, this must be done with all of your money, your dollars, your 'financial instruments,' your accounts receivable and accounts payable - everything. It has to be done to your normal inventory too, your refrigerators in the warehouse.

Then, and only then, I might believe that somebody KNEW whether they were profiting or not.