Does excel really lack this function?

I canīt believe that I canīt Google the answer to this simple problem:

Below are 7 dates with index prices (SP500)

Jan 05, 2006 1273.48 0.00%
Jan 06, 2006 1285.45 0.94%
Jan 09, 2006 1290.15 0.37%
Jan 10, 2006 1289.69 -0.04%
Jan 11, 2006 1294.18 0.35%
Jan 12, 2006 1286.06 -0.63%
Jan 13, 2006 1287.61 0.12%


What I need to calculate is the average return for these seven dates in percentages.

I obviously am working on historical data of several decades, but I need to find the historical growth rate of a certain period, and to make it simple I chose one week.

Could someone please show me how to calculate the average return for the first 3 dates. It would need to work so that once I copy the formula down to lower cells, it will always calculate the average of the 3 previous days.

So on Jan 9th we get average return for Jan 5th 6th and 9th, and on Jan 10th we get average return for Jan 6th 9th and 10th and so on.

I need to calculate average historical returns over a ten week period of time for the last 3 decades for any given date.

Hope someone smarter can help.

Hi, thanks for the quick reply.
The answer seems to be 1,00314 which cant be correct. Converting this to percentages means 0,003% but when you look at the numbers, start date 1273,46$ to 1285,45$ i doesn't add up. Difference is about 12$ and 1% of 1273,46$ is 12.73$. So the correct answer should be around 1%...

Any ideas?

Check your other thread for the answer.