Question

Researchers in Finance find that, in general, stock market performs the best in January, and the worst in fall, such as October. You would like to test whether this is accurate. You will do so by calculating the historical monthly holding period returns of S&P 500 index from 1950 to 2019. Across these 80 years of monthly data, you will calculate the average returns for all 12 months (Jan, Feb, … Dec) and find out which month performed the best and which month performed the worst.

Submit 1 Excel file showing your work.

Answer 1

The monthly closing prices for the period is downloaded from Yahoo Finance.

We use the "Adjusted Close" because it adjusts for corporate actions.

Holding period return of each month = (current month price - previous month price) / previous month price

Next, we calculate the average returns for all 12 months.

November performed the best and September performed the worst.