Your explanation would be helpful to someone who knew excel better than I, but it leads me to a certain point and then stumps me. I'd love to get a copy of the spreadsheet if you were willing. It would make a lot more sense to me!

I have the average performance for each sector copied into 18 colums, one per sector, CA to CR (columns A to BZ are used to calculate each sectors performance for 3/6/12 months and average).

Then I evaluate the best performance, with the “large” function of Excel, and this gives me in columns CS to CU the values of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd best performance.
So in CSi, I have =LARGE(CAi:CRi;1), in CTi =LARGE(CAi:CRi;2) etc…
where i represents the number of the row.

Then I use an Excel matrix formula to return the number of the column, which I have entered into cells CA1 to CR1 : the formula for retrieving the number of the best performer in CVi is
=OFFSET($CA$1;0;MAX(($CAi:$CRi=CSi)*(COLUMN($CAi:$CRi)))-COLUMN($CA$1))

You need to enter this formula with CTRL-SHIFT because this is a matrix formula.

You then need to increment CS to CT for the second best performer and to CU for the third.

You will then have the ordinal number of the 3 best performers for line i in CVi to CXi.

That's it.

BTW the tip for the matrix formula is available from specialized Excel forums on the web.

Hope this helps.

I'm curious how you built it (I have done a few on my own and have some incredibly cumbersome AND statements that I wonder if folks have found more elegant solutions for) as well as simply ease my curiosity of what each month looks like holding wise.

I only took the series named DJ Stoxx 600 and excluded the two series related to real estate.

I just sent a file to Mebane with the 10 months MA, so that he can post it. Looks a little bit less attractive.
Cheers,

Pierre