Just a quick blog post today, looking at market performance for a bunch of stocks so far this year (otherwise known as year to date or YTD).

As a reference point, today (24 March 2022) the S&P500 is at -6.2% and the Nasdaq is at -11% for YTD.

I am using the Excel Price Feed Add-in to download latest price data and start of year prices for a small set of diverse US stocks. I use the live price formula (EPF.Yahoo.Price) in column C together with the historical price formula (EPF.Yahoo.Historic.Close) in column D to retrieve the stock price on the first trading day of the year which was 3rd January.

This produces the following data table (you can see the formula for cell D2 in the formula bar):

Now that we have the current stock price and at the start of the year we can calculate the % change using a simple Excel formula which works out the difference (C2-D2) as a proportion of D2:

Now we can apply this formula to the rest of the table and create a simple bar chart to visualize the performance:

As we can see the tech sector is under-performing, particularly Facebook and Netflix whilst the oil giants Exxon and Chevron are out-performing everything else.

I hope this gives a good introduction to stock analysis using Excel, to find out more about Excel Price Feed head over to the website and try it free for 10 days: https://www.excelpricefeed.com/