Find five firms in an industry of your choice listed on the NYSE. The information is in the public domain and will require you to find the data. You may use something like Yahoo Finance or NASDAQ.com $($I have confirmed that these two allow you to download $.$csv files for $5$ years of monthly historical data$)$ to pull the data.

Carry out the following tasks:

Task $1.$ Track the performance of their stocks over the last $5$ years of monthly data $($track stock prices$)$ using appropriate visual tools.

Task $2.$ Calculate the descriptive statistics for each of the firms and the aggregate industry using the appropriate excel tools.

Task $3.$ Which of these firms would you invest in and why? Give the top $3$ firms based on the information that you have gathered and other information from newspapers, periodicals, firm websites, etc. Remember, your investment decision is affected by the rewards and risks associated with the returns. Please do not just provide qualitative answers $-$ but also substantiate them with statistics such as trend values, standard deviations, etc. using the appropriate notation.

Task $4.$ Do you see any trends in the data vis$--$vis the stock markets?