Suppose you hold a portfolio consisting of a $45,000,000 investment in company A stock and a $55,000,000 investment in company B stock. Both companies A and B are current ASX 50 companies. You will find a ranked list of the companies in the appendix of this assignment. Rules for the choice of companies A and B. Company A is ranked as the sum of the last six digits in your student number, and company B is ranked as the sum of the last two digits of your student number. The ranking is based on the alphabetical order as given in the Appendix. If the sum of the last six digits, in case of A, is more than 50, you will choose the company with the rank of (the sum 50). In case of B, if the sum is 0, you then choose the rank of 2. For example, if your student number is s7999889, company A should be ranked as (9+9+9+8+8+9)=52-50=2; company B should be ranked as 8+9=17. If your student number is s1234500, you should choose company A with the rank of (2+3+4+5+0+0)=14, and company B with the rank of (0+0)=0 which will mean rank of 2. Please provide your calculation to show how you have chosen companies A and B. Once you identify the two companies, you can retrieve relevant data from Refinitiv Workspace. Please use the instructions available under L@G/Course contents/Refinitiv Workspace. If you cannot access Refinitiv Workspace, alternatively you can go to Yahoo! Finance to retrieve the relevant data. You can now start performing the following tasks:

a. Describe briefly the core area of business activities of companies A and B. [2 marks]

b. Search for the stocks of these two companies. Download historical daily price data over the last 501 trading days (approx. 2 years). [2 marks]

c. Calculate with Excel the daily returns of the stocks of companies A and B. [1 mark]