fede,
Your data can be stored in a table. Tables allow you to operate on numeric values while also keeping column headers to easily interpret your data.
If you are getting data from a delimited text file or Excel file, try using the readtable function so your data is in table format. If this is not an option, you can transform data from your workspace into a table.
Below is example code for building a table out of workspace data (a numeric matrix and cell of headers).
testdata = magic(3);
stocks = {'ibm','jpm','etc'};
tabledata = array2table(testdata,'VariableNames',stocks);
Hope this helps.
