APA Business and Management

Financial Management

The excel file MBAN622 Assignment Data includes the monthly prices of five
publicly traded companies over the last five years. Your task is to evaluate their
monthly performance over the last five years, where for each company you will
need to find the monthly returns based on the prices. Therefore, you should
evaluate the performance in relation to the stock price trends, their returns and
volatilities (variances and standard deviations) and provide comparisons among
the five companies.
2. Calculate the correlations between the company returns and comment on the
results referring to the concept of diversification.
3. Based on the results you obtain in (1) and (2), choose TWO companies out of the
five you have. Form a portfolio with the two chosen companies (weights
allocated to each dependent on your preference) and calculate expected return
and volatility of that portfolio over the past 5 years. Compare it with the
characteristics of individual assets (for those 2 companies you have chosen) and
provide clear justification of your investment choice.
4. Present your results in a word document, clearly marking each question and
providing analyses/interpretations to all results you obtain. (All calculations
should be carried out in excel).
Instructions:
This coursework is to be prepared individually. The deadline for submission is on
the 1st of May 2020. The assignment should be uploaded on Moodle by the end of
the day. No late submissions will be accepted unless extenuating circumstances.
The font of the assignment should be 12pt (tables, graphs or appendices should be
at least 10pt), with 1.5 spacing, and there is no word limit.
Make sure you use references correctly and my advice is not to use Wikipedia,
Investopedia, Dikipedia or any other unsound website as a source of reference.
Wikipedia is a starting point for gathering information, and should be used just for
that, and not as a valid source of reference.
Should you need any clarifications regarding the assignment, please email me on