How to Compute the 52-Week Average Selling Price of a Stock

Most stocks have prices that fluctuate daily as a result of supply and demand, market psychological effect and individual investor needs. As such, looking at a stock's closing price on just one day does not give an accurate view of the stock's price movement for investment decisions. A stock's 52-week average selling price is the sum of the stock's average closing prices from each trading day during the 52-week period over the number of trading days in that 52-week period. The 52-week average selling price calculation helps smooth out a stock's daily price fluctuations, which can lead to confused analysis, and highlight the direction of the stock's pricing trends.

Visit the Yahoo Finance website. Use the link to the website in the resources section (see Resources 1).

Enter the company's ticker symbol in the search box. If you need to look up the ticker symbol for the company, search the online NASDAQ Symbol Lookup database (see Resources 2).

Enter the start date for the 52-week period in the start date box. Enter the end date for the 52-week period in the end date box. For example, if you want to compute the 52-week average selling price of a stock for the 52-week period between Feb. 1, 2010, and Feb. 1, 2011, enter Feb. 1, 2010, in the start date box and Feb. 1, 2011, in the end date box.

Select "Daily" and then click on the "Get Prices" button. For each trading day in the 52-week period, the website will provide historical data including the stock's opening price, high price, low price, volume, close price and adjusted close price. The number you will need for your calculation is the adjusted closing price, which is the price the stock sold for at the close of the trading day amended for any distributions or corporate activity that occurred before the open of the next trading day.

Click on the "Download to Spreadsheet" button at the bottom of your screen to download the historical price data for your specified 52-week period to Microsoft Excel.

Highlight all the entries in the "Adjusted Close" column in your Excel spreadsheet. Select "Average" from the Auto Sum drop-down menu located in your Excel toolbar at the top of your screen. Scroll down to the bottom of the "Adjusted Close" column to see the computed average. This number represents the stock's 52-week average selling price. If you do not have Excel, you can manually calculate the 52-week average selling price by calculating the sum of the adjusted daily closing prices for each trading day listed in the 52-week period. Then, take that amount and divide it by the number of trading days in the 52-week period. For example, the sum of the adjusted closing prices from all the trading days in the 52-week period from Feb. 1, 2010, to Feb. 1, 2011, is $6,626.71. The number of trading days between Feb. 1, 2010, and Feb. 1, 2011, is 254. Divide $6,626.71 by 254. This equals a $26.09 52-week average selling price for the stock.