I want it to look something like the following:
SYMBOL…BUY…DATE…PRICE…SELL…DATE…PRICE…PROFIT/LOSS
IBM 100shs 6/15 165.00 100shs 6/21 185.00 + $2000
HPQ 500shs 7/30 70.10 500shs 8/05 68.60 ( - 750)
With a total at the end of the week or month
Perhaps make a list of ticker codes on a separate sheet and use Data validity for the trade ledger sheet, to ensure codes are entered consistently.
Profit/loss formula is trivial. Note that if you type in as indicated above, “shs” is not part of any valid number notation, so it will be interpreted as “no number” and calculations will give error (error message, or wrong calculation because it is taken as zero). For numerical input in a spreadsheet, avoid using any units prefix/suffix unless you are sure you (or Calc) can extract numerical info reliably from the input.
With your suggested layout you could have something like this: TradeJournal.ods
I would rather use separate rows for each trade instance. (Buy/sell). The summary (ticker sheet) could be filtered to show profitable objects, or you can use a filtered pivot table to extract such info.
I used ticker codes from http://eoddata.com/symbols.aspx, just copied the “A” page for NYSE. With a limited selection of stocks it is probably just as easy to enter manually, but I believe you can download full lists from there for your desired exchange board, free of charge, but they require registration which I didn’t bother to do.