How to Calculate Daily Stock Return

Find the closing share price of a stock for the current day and the previous day on a financial website, such as Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance or MSN Money. The prices can be found by entering the stock symbol in the 'Get Quotes,' or similarly named, box near the top of the financial website's homepage.
Subtract the previous day's closing price from the current day's close. If the stock increased in value, the number will be positive. A down day will result in a negative number. For example, assume your stock finished yesterday at $24.75 and today the price fell and finished at $22. Subtract $24.75 from $22 to get negative $2.75.
Divide the result by the previous day's close and multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage. Continuing the example, divide negative $2.75 by $24.75 for a result of negative 0.1111. Multiply by 100 to get a daily stock return of -11.11 percent.

How to Calculate The Cost of a Newly Issued Preferred Stock

Convert the flotation cost percent to a decimal by dividing the number by 100. For example, a 5 percent flotation cost divided by 100 would be:
5/100=0.05
Subtract the decimal of the flotation cost from 1. For the example:
1 -- 0.05 = 0.95
Multiply the market price for the preferred stock by one minus the flotation cost. For the example, a market price of $100 would yield:
100x (0.95) = 95.
Divide the dividend paid by the preferred stock by this number. For the example, a dividend for the stock of $5 would result in:
5/95 = 0.053
Multiply this result by 100 to find the cost of the newly issued preferred stock as a percent. For the example:
0.053 x 100 = 5.3 percent.