Buy, sell, buy, sell! We’ve all seen movies and news clips of stockbrokers scrambling around the floor of the stock exchange. While the stock market was once a frantic chase to stay on top of the latest updates, these days, you can easily monitor and manage your investments calmly from your computer. One of the best ways to evaluate how well your stocks are performing is to calculate their daily return. Basically, it tells you how much a stock’s value changed over a day. Using this information, you can determine whether you want to invest more in a company or try investing elsewhere. It’s also pretty easy to find the daily return of a stock and you have multiple tools you can use at your disposal.


 
Method 1 of 4:
Finding Stock Prices
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1
Visit a financial website that lists stock prices. Open up a web browser and search for a stock or finance website that lists stock information. Click on the site and look for a search field you can use to look up a company.[1]
There are a ton of finance sites you can use. A few examples include Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch.com, TD Ameritrade, and Nasdaq.
Because all of the financial sites pull their info from the stock market, they should all have the same information.
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2
Search for a company by name or using its stock’s ticker symbol. A stock ticker symbol is a unique series of letters assigned to a company for trading purposes. Every company on the stock market has one. Enter your company’s ticker symbol or their name into the company search field to look up their stock info.[2]
For example, the clothing brand Gap has “GPS” as its stock ticker and the animation studio Pixar has “PIXR.”
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3
Make sure the data includes the adjusted closing prices. Whenever you pull up the data, look through the information to see what it includes. Find the “adjusted closing prices” data, which will help you calculate your daily returns.[3]
Some sites may not include the adjusted closing prices or they may list the estimated closing price. If it doesn’t include the adjusted closing prices (which have been adjusted to be fully accurate), try looking up the company on another finance site.
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4
Download the info for the period of time you’re interested in for reference. If you plan to manually calculate and track your daily stock returns, choose the option to download the data. Save it onto your computer so you can reference and pull the information that you need.[4]
Just make sure the data includes the adjusted closing prices.
If you’re trying to track your stocks over a period of time, downloading the info may come in handy.