Download the monthly Adjusted Closing Price for Target Corp. (Ticker = TGT) and S&P 500 (ticker = ^GSPC) from Yahoo website from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2017 and calculate following:

Average monthly return for Target and S&P 500

Variance of returns for Target and S&P 500

Standard deviation of returns for Target and S&P 500

Correlation between Target and S&P 500

Beta for Target

Instructions for downloading the data from Yahoo!:

To obtain the monthly data for each company, on Yahoo! Finance website, enter the ticker symbol under Quote Lookup. Then, click on Historical Data. Enter Time Period as given above. For Frequency, make sure Monthly is selected and then click on Apply. Click on Download Data.

First Calculate Returns:

Keep only Date and Adj Close columns for each company. Put all three sets of data in one excel file to do further analysis.

Use the Adj Close column to obtain returns for each period. Remember that the Adjusted Close column has already adjusted the prices for dividends and stock splits so you do not have to adjust for it again. Just use the adjusted close column to obtain the returns.

Return for Month2 = Adj Close for Month2/Adj Close for Month1 - 1