Question

This is probably painfully easy to solve but I have been fiddling with it for a while now and can’t seem to solve it.

Column A hold the market return, column B the return of a certain stock. I want to calculate the excess market return: how many $ has the stock performed better than the market? In column C, I have calculated the values by hand:

  .      A       B       C
 ---------------------------
 1   -2.22    0.17    2.39
 2   -2.99    0.57    3.56     both the market as the stock have lost, but the
 3  -11.68   -0.40   11.28 <-- stock has lost 11.28 less than the market has
 4    6.16    0.06   -6.10 <-- compared to the market, the stock underperformed
 5    0.94   -0.22   -1.16      by 6.10
 6    7.45    0.17   -7.28
 7   -1.96   -0.07    1.89

You can’t just simply extract A1 from B1, or vice versa. I’m confused; who isn’t and knows what formula to use in C1;C7 to get the right answers?

Answer 1

The following should work:

=B1-A1