1.Use data from finance.yahoo.com to answer the following questions:a.Collect the following data for 25 firms of your choosing.i.Book-to-market ratio.ii.Priceearnings ratio.iii.Market capitalization (size).iv.Pricecash flow ratio (i.e., market capitalization/operating cash flow).v.Another criterion that interests you.You can find this information by choosing a company and then clicking on Statistics. Rank the firms based on each of the criteria separately, and divide the firms into five groups based on their ranking for each criterion. Calculate the average rate of return for each group of firms.Do you confirm or reject any of the anomalies cited in this chapter? Can you uncover a new anomaly? Note: For your test to be valid, you must form your portfolios based on criteria observed at the beginning of the period. Why?b.Now form stock groups that use two criteria simultaneously. For example, form a portfolio of stocks that are both in the lowest quintile of priceearnings ratio and in the highest quintile of book-to-market ratio. Does selecting stocks based on more than one charac-teristic improve your ability to devise portfolios with abnormal returns? Repeat the analy-sis by forming groups that meet three criteria simultaneously. Does this yield any further improvement in abnormal returns?SOLUTIONS TO CONCEPT CHECKS1.a.A high-level manager might well have private information about the firm. Her ability to trade profitably on that information is not surprising. This ability does not violate weak-form efficiency: The abnormal profits are not derived from an analysis of past price and trading data. If they were, this would indicate that there is valuable information that can be gleaned from such analysis. But this ability does violate strong-form efficiency. Apparently, there is some private information that is not already reflected in stock prices.b.The information sets that pertain to the weak, semistrong, and strong form of the EMH can be described by the following illustration:Strong-formsetSemistrong-formsetWeak-formsetThe weak-form information set includes only the history of prices and volumes. The semistrong-form set includes the weak form set plus all publicly available information. In turn, the strong-form set includes the semistrong set plus insiders information. It is illegal to act on this incremental information (insiders private information). The direction of valid implication isStrong-form EMH Semistrong-form EMH Weak-form EMHThe reverse direction implication is not valid. For example, stock prices may reflect all past price data (weak-form efficiency) but may not reflect relevant fundamental data (semistrong-form inefficiency).Final PDF to printer