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I'd like to be able to access historical total (market) return data from a Google Sheet with the end goal of creating a self-updating rolling return histogram of various asset allocations.

However, it looks like the GoogleFinance functions in Google Sheets can only access share prices, not dividends. For this data to be useful to me, I would like to include the effects of reinvesting the dividends. I don't know of what use historical data is without any indication of dividend returns.

Is there a way to include dividends in a Google docs spreadsheet? Or even better, is there an online tool that will already show histograms (or show some variance metric) for various distributions?

glenviewjeff
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2 Answers2

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This is the same answer as for your other question, but you can easily do this yourself:

( initial adjusted close / final adjusted close ) ^ ( 1 / ( # of years sampled) )

Note: "# of years sampled" can be a fraction, so the one week # of years sampled would be 1/52.

Crazy to say, but yahoo finance is better at quick, easy, and free data. Just pick a security, go to historical prices, and use the "adjusted close".

money.msn's best at presenting finances quick, easy, and cheap.

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At this time, Google Finance doesn't support historical return or dividend data, only share prices. The attributes for mutual funds such as return52 are only available as real-time data, not historical.

Yahoo Finance offers "adjusted return" prices for many tickers, which reflect total returns. Normally, one cannot access this data from within Google Sheets, but there is a plugin from WebDataHub.com that presently costs at least $19/month for their service.

There is also an article that walks you through how to write Google Apps Script that will allow Google Sheets to scrape data from Yahoo Finance.

glenviewjeff
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