Project on Stock Market Data Analysis and Portfolio Optimization

Import Data

Introduction
The aim of this project is to prepare, evaluate and analyse stock market data and to recommend an optimal portfolio consisting of two stocks. You have been assigned three stocks, all three must be included in the analysis which works towards your recommendation of a final optimal portfolio. The project requires a deep understanding of both the statistics and the mathematics components of this unit. It is recommended that you work on this on a weekly basis.

Refer to the rubric at the end of this document to understand how this assessment will be graded. In particular, note that all figures need to be numbered and labelled, and you need to include all the steps to involved with arriving at each of your answers.

Your final report should be a pdf document. An RMarkdown document to get you started is available on the unit Blackboard site. Show all of your coding by keeping echo = TRUE. Make sure to update your name and student ID in the YAML of the document.

Import Data
Import the adjusted stock prices for the three stocks which you have been assigned. See the Markdown file for hints.

The Analysis

 Plot prices over time
Plot the prices of each asset over time separately. Succinctly describe in words the evolution of each asset over time. (limit: 100 words for each time series).

Calculate returns and plot returns over time Calculate the daily percentage returns of each asset.

Histogram of returns
Create a histogram for each of the returns series (explain how you determined the number of bins to use).

Summary table of returns
Report the descriptive statistics in a single table which includes the mean, median, variance, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis for each series. What conclusions can you draw from these descriptive statistics?

Are average returns significantly diferent from zero?
Under the assumption that the returns of each asset are drawn from an independently and identically distributed normal distribution, are the expected returns of each asset statistically dierent from zero at the 1% level of significance? Provide details for all 5 steps to conduct a hypothesis test, including the equation for the test statistic.

Calculate and report all the relevant values for your conclusion and be sure to provide an interpretation of the results.

Are average returns diferent from each other?
Assume the returns of each asset are independent from each other. With this assumption, are the mean returns statistically dierent from each other at the 1% level of significance? Provide details for all 5 steps to conduct each of the hypothesis tests using what your have learned in the unit. Calculate and report all the relevant values for your conclusion and be sure to provide and interpretation of the results. (Hint: You need to discuss the equality of variances to determine which type of test to use.)

Correlations

Calculate and present the correlation matrix of the returns. Discuss the direction and strength of the correlations.

Testing the significance of correlations

Is the assumption of independence of stock returns realistic? Provide evidence (the hypothesis test including all 5 steps of the hypothesis test and the equation for the test statistic) and a rationale to support your conclusion.

Advising an investor
Suppose that an investor has asked you to assist them in choosing two of these three stocks to include in their portfolio

The impact of financial events on returns
Two significant financial events have occurred in recent history. On September 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and a Global Financial Crisis started. On March 11, 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Use linear regression to determine if
a. Any of the stocks in your data exhibit positive returns over time.
b. Either of the two events had a significant impact on returns.

Report the regression output for each stock and interpret the results to address these two questions. How would you interpret this information in the context of your chosen portfolio?

Submission
1. Submit the pdf output of your completed project to the Turnitin.com link on the BlackBoard site for our unit.
ii. Keep the sections as they are in this document
iii. Ensure that all Figures and Tables are numbered, and have appropriate captions.
iv. All your calculations and steps used to produce the results should be included. So include any mathematical calculations and set echo=TRUE in all of your code chunk headers, including those used to
generate figures.
2. Additional details
• All results (numbers) should be accurate to 3 decimal places.
• Proof-read your report - do not include spelling or grammatical errors.