I have gathered the information needed for question 1 and created the spreadsheet, however I need help with computing questions 2 - 4. Can you please help me understand how to compute the questions for at least one stock (ADM) so that I can understand how to complete the others?

The stocks that I need to evaluate are:

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)

Boeing (BA)

Caterpillar (CAT)

Deere & Co. (DE)

General Mills, Inc. (GIS)

eBay (EBAY)

Hershey (HSY)

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)

JPMorgan Chase & Co. ( JPM)

Microsoft (MSFT)

Procter and Gamble (PG)

Walmart (WMT)

The data for ADM is below.

Date ADM 4/1/10 null 5/1/10 19.953289 6/1/10 20.50075 7/1/10 21.723492 8/1/10 24.462751 9/1/10 25.471262 10/1/10 26.588419 11/1/10 23.133196 12/1/10 24.122847 1/1/11 26.199911 2/1/11 29.816732 3/1/11 29.00507 4/1/11 29.818592 5/1/11 26.105362 6/1/11 24.407 7/1/11 24.593184 8/1/11 23.055103 9/1/11 20.198404 10/1/11 23.560728 11/1/11 24.521402 12/1/11 23.421564 1/1/12 23.446136 2/1/12 25.5508 3/1/12 26.075039 4/1/12 25.391451 5/1/12 26.256233 6/1/12 24.441965 7/1/12 21.601995 8/1/12 22.148455 9/1/12 22.657408 10/1/12 22.37398 11/1/12 22.257277 12/1/12 22.991745 1/1/13 23.948689 2/1/13 26.743961 3/1/13 28.486048 4/1/13 28.663393 5/1/13 27.219252 6/1/13 28.799038 7/1/13 30.973196 8/1/13 29.903105 9/1/13 31.450787 10/1/13 34.916866 11/1/13 34.361954 12/1/13 37.223053 1/1/14 33.860977 2/1/14 34.821571 3/1/14 37.434788 4/1/14 37.72813 5/1/14 38.772064 6/1/14 38.261547 7/1/14 40.247917 8/1/14 43.249172 9/1/14 44.53944 10/1/14 40.965828 11/1/14 45.916588 12/1/14 45.5341 1/1/15 40.831825 2/1/15 41.926392 3/1/15 41.755268 4/1/15 43.059013

1.Collect price information for each stock from Yahoo! Finance (finance.yahoo.com) as follows:

a.Enter the stock symbol. On the page for that stock, click "Historical Prices" on the left side of the page.

b.Enter the "start date" as April 30, 2010 and the "end date" as April 30, 2015 to cover the five-year period. Make sure you click "monthly" next to the date; the closing prices reported by Yahoo! will then be for the last day of each month.

c.After hitting "Get Prices," scroll to the bottom of the first page and click "Download to Spreadsheet." If you are asked if you want to open or save the file, click open.

d.Copy the entire spreadsheet, open Excel, and paste the Web data into a spreadsheet. Delete all the columns except the date and the adjusted close (the first and last columns).

e.Keep the Excel file open and go back to the Yahoo! Finance Web page and hit the back button. If you are asked if you want to save the data, click no.

f.When you return to the prices page, enter the next stock symbol and hit "Get Prices" again. Do not change the dates or frequency, but make sure you have the same dates for all the stocks you will download. Again, click "Download to Spreadsheet" and then open the file. Copy the last column, "Adj. Close," paste it into the Excel file and change "Adj. Close" to the stock symbol. Make sure that the first and last prices are in the same rows as the first stock.

g.Repeat these steps for the remaining 10 stocks, pasting each closing price right next to the other stocks, again making sure that the correct prices on the correct dates all appear on the same rows.

2.I need to convert the gathered prices to monthly returns as the percentage change in the monthly prices. Since there's no data for the first month, I don't need to compute the monthly return for the first month.

3.I need to calculate the mean monthly returns and standard deviations for the monthly returns of each of the stocks.Then I need to convert the monthly statistics to annual statistics for easier interpretation (multiply the mean monthly return by 12, and multiply the monthly standard deviation by1212).

4.How do I calculate the average return across stocks for each month? This is the monthly return to an equally weighted portfolio of the stocks. Compute the mean and standard deviation of monthly returns for the equally weighted portfolio. Double check that the average return on this equally weighted portfolio is equal to the average return of all of the individual stocks. Convert these monthly statistics to annual statistics (as described in Step 3) for interpretation.