a.) A stock has the following prices in 5 consecutive months, starting from the earliest to the latest: $55, $52, $61, $58, and $56. What is standard deviation of its monthly returns?

b.)You are expecting either a recession or steady growth next year. Recession has a 17% probability of happening. In steady growth, stock ABC returns 13.00% and stock XYZ returns 10.00%. In a recession, stock ABC returns -6.60% and stock XYZ returns -4.40%. You are going to put together a portfolio of these two stocks with positive portfolio weight in each and allocate 63% of the portfolio to ABC with the remainder to XYZ. What is the variance of the portfolio?