Getting started:
For the project, form a 2-3 person team. As a team, pick 5 large ( > $1 billion market cap) publicly traded companies that you might want to invest in. Make sure all 5 companies have been publicly traded with daily price data available in Yahoo Finance for at least the last 5 years. Create a portfolio that invests 24% of $1 million in company A, 22% in company B, 20% in company C, 18% in company D, and 16% in company E.
Please enter the return standard deviations for each of the 5 stocks and for the portfolio during the last calendar year. Please use daily returns, and make sure to show your work. Please keep in mind that the standard deviation you will get using daily data is the daily standard deviation. In finance, the practice is to annualize the standard deviation by multiplying the daily standard deviation by sqrt(252) - there are approximately 252 trading days in a year. This is especially important if you want to be able to compute the Sharpe ratio correctly. The numerator in the Sharpe ratio is the ***annual*** excess return. Therefore, the denominator, which is the standard deviation, should also be annualized. The Companies are: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Macy's. Last calendar year is 2016.