Calculating the correlation coefficient is time-consuming, so data is often plugged into a calculator, computer, or statistics program to find the coefficient.

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The correlation coefficient is a number between 1 and -1. A number close to 1 means two factors are positively correlated—they rise or fall together and at the same magnitude.

Following up on that, of course, calculating statistical measures such as standard deviation and correlation manually can be cumbersome.

From the statistical definition above, an alternative definition of beta is that it equals the correlation between the stock's returns and the market's returns multiplied by the standard deviation ...