Using a spreadsheet

 

Your statement from your broker provides all the information you need such as rate of return and your cost basis. However, it does not provide the performances of your strategies vs the market. We can use a spreadsheet such as Excel to calculate it as follows.

 

Return = (A-B)/B

 

Where A = the return of your strategy

             B = the return of SPY (an ETF simulating S&P 500 index)

 

It does not always work as illustrated next with all possible cases and many commit the same error.

 

Case	A	B	%	Work?
1	12	10	20%	Yes
2	-12	10	-220%	Yes
3	12	-10	-220%	No
4	-12	-10	20%	No

 

Now, we change the formula to Return = (A-B)/Abs(B) and it works for all four cases as illustrated below

 

Case	A	B	%	Work?
1	12	10	20%	Yes
2	-12	10	-220%	Yes
3	12	-10	220%	Yes
4	-12	-10	-20%	Yes

 

You should always check the results to ensure whether the formula works. For simplicity, the row numbers have not been added. If dividend return is important, you should add the dividend yields to A and B. The following suggests how to handle null value.

 

=if(A=””, “”, (A-B)/Abs(B))