All Excel worksheets and R$-$output printouts should have clear explanation of methods and formulae used. There is no need to include the entire data sets used in the coursework but you may append a few sample pages of the data.

The tasks:

$($i$)$ Download the historical prices of any five stocks previously selected in your portfolio. The historical prices should go back a sufficient period in time from the date that you obtain the data in order to yield positive average returns. Give a brief description of each company and the type of business they are in$.$

Calculate the expected return and the volatility for each company as well as the correlations between the asset returns.