Analyzing stock returns

Welcome to our online tutorial on analyzing stock returns. This tutorial is for total beginners and assumes no prior experience in working with stock price or return data. You can access the tutorial for free and complete the lessons in your own time.

Tutorial structure

The tutorial is structured as a series of lessons each of which includes a video and step-by-step instructions.

If you’re a total beginner, we suggest you start from the very beginning: Downloading stock price data.

If you’re familiar with downloading stock price data from online data providers (e.g., Yahoo! Finance) or databases such as Datastream, you can skip the first lesson and can go straight to plotting stock prices and returns.

You can also watch the videos on our Youtube channel.

Intended learning outcomes

At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to:

• download and organize data on stock prices and returns,
• obtain descriptive statistics,
• produce histograms and time-series plots,
• estimate the correlation coefficient between two stocks,
• and critically evaluate stock return distributions.

Detailed learning plan

The tutorial begins with demonstrating how to download stock price data from Yahoo! finance, which is a popular provider of financial data. It then moves on to discuss useful ways of visualizing stock prices and returns. After that, we delve deeper by explaining how to obtain and interpret descriptive statistics of stock returns and how to compute correlations.