Suppose you are a CFO of a certain company that holds a lot of cash and wants to invest it$.$ Using portfolio theory, optimize your companies$$ investment strategy in $5$ selected stocks.Suppose you are a CFO of a certain company that holds a lot of cash and wants to invest it$.$ Using portfolio theory, optimize your companies$$ investment strategy in $5$ selected stocks.

$$ Apple Inc.: AAPL $($Technology $-$ Consumer Electronics$)$

$$ Johnson & Johnson: JNJ $($Healthcare $-$ Pharmaceuticals$)$

$$ International Business Machines Corporation: IBM $($Technology $-$ Information Technology Services$)$

$$ McDonald's Corporation: MCD $($Consumer Services $-$ Restaurants$)$

$$ The Coca$-$Cola Company: KO $($Consumer Goods $-$ Beverages$)$

the adjusted daily closing prices starting from January $2022$ and ending December $2023.$

For each stock find the:

a$.$ Get the one year close to close returns for each of the years $2022-2023.$

b$.$ Mean Annual Return over the two years

c$.$ Variance and Standard Deviation of return.

d$.$ Find the correlation coefficient and the covariance of returns between the stocks over this period.

both in excel and written