Financial information about individual firms is now often available on the Internet, either as summaries or linked to the firm's home page (often under a heading such as "investor relations"). Select an important number such as "profit margin" that can be meaningfully compared across large and small firms.
a. Identify a population of firms of interest to you and create a sampling frame.
b. Select a random sample of 10 firms. Find the data for these firms.
c. Compute the average and the standard error.
d. Indicate (approximately) how far your average is from the mean value for all firms listed in your frame.
e. Write a paragraph summarizing what you have learned about statistics and about the firms in your population.