FIN 340 Module Two Activity Instructions 1. Open a new Excel workbook in which you can aggregate all of the data and make the necessary calculations. 2. Create a Data tab where you will copy your price data, and a Table tab where you will put your calculations for each stock/ETF into a presentable Summary Table. 3. Go to Yahoo! and at the top of the screen, search for the three required companies. 4. For each company, go to the Historical Data section. 5. Change the Data Settings: ● Change the Time Period settings by entering the most recent month-end date into the End Date box, and then change the Start Date box to five years prior to the End Date and select Done. ● Change the Frequency setting to Monthly. ● Select the Apply box at the right-hand side of the Settings bar. The data should update. ● Select Download. The data should begin downloading as a CSV file. 6. Open the CSV file: Depending on the browser you use, you can either open the file from the browser or go to the appropriate file path where the file was saved and open from your file explorer. 7. Copy Data: For the first of the three stocks, you will want to copy both the Date column and the Adj Close column from the CSV file to your Excel workbook tab named Data. For the second and third stocks, you only need to copy the Adj Close column. You should change the Adj Close heading for each stock to the company name or symbol so the columns are easily identifiable. After all three stocks have been copied over, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the columns and make sure they are the same length to verify that you have copied the same amount of data for each stock. 8. Calculate the monthly returns for each month. Remember that the Adj Close prices that you downloaded from Yahoo! include all dividends. Therefore, you can simply take the percentage change between each month for each stock. You can create another tab for the monthly returns, but you may prefer to keep this data in the same tab as the price data, since they are so closely linked. This will also allow you to scan and review the sets of data side-by-side for accuracy checks. In a =(B5/B4-1) formula, B5 is the more recent date and B4 is the older date. The =(B5/B4-1) formula can be dragged by hovering over the bottom right corner of the cell until you see +. Once you see +, you can hold your left mouse button and drag that formula to other cells. If the stock price went down, you will have a negative result. 9. Create the Summary Table: You will create a table in the Table tab where you can aggregate all of the summary statistics side-by-side so they are easily comparable to one another. You can determine your columns and rows by the number of stocks in the table compared to the number of summary statistics you are placing in the table. You typically want the larger number to go down the rows and the lesser number to go across the columns. Here we have five summary statistics and three stocks, so you should place statistics down the rows and stocks across the columns. Statistic Excel Functions Average Monthly Return: AVERAGE Annualized Return Based on Average Monthly Return: The annualized return transforms the average monthly return into a comparable one-year return. ((1+Avg. Monthly Return)^12)-1 Monthly Standard Deviation: STDEV.S Annualized Standard Deviation: The annualized standard deviation transforms the monthly standard deviation into a comparable one-year standard deviation. Monthly St. Dev * SQRT(12)