Not all stock market indexes are created equal. Different methods are used to calculate various indexes, and different indexes will yield different assessments of “market performance.”
Using one of the following data sources, retrieve the stock price for five different firms on the first and last trading days of the previous month.
www.nasdaq.com—Get a quote using the company’s ticker symbol; then select Interactive Charts and specify one month. When the chart appears, click on a data point to display the underlying data.
www.bloomberg.com—Go to the Stocks tab, and get a quote using the company’s ticker symbol. Click on View Full Chart. Use the moving line to see the closing price today and one month ago.
finance.yahoo.com—Get a quote; then click on Historical Data and specify a date range.

a. Compute the monthly return on a price-weighted index of the five stocks.

b. Compute the monthly return on a value-weighted index of the five stocks.

c. Compare the two returns and explain their differences. Explain how you would interpret each measure.