The Bowerman Warehouse Corporation ("BWC") is organized in Oregon and operates 15 retail and grocery stores in several of the western US states. BWC is owned by a small group of private equity investors. BWC follows generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

You are the pension fund manager for the company and in charge of selecting two new investments for the fund. You are considering the following three possible investments:

• The Vanguard 500 Index Fund Admiral Shares (VFIAX)
• The Fidelity Trend Fund (FTRNX)
• The T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund (PRNHX)

You need to make a decision which portfolio are the best investments to be added to the pension plan assets. In order to do so, you need to compare the performance of the three funds to each other as well as "the market" in general. Because your supervisor is not that familiar with the finance terminology, she has asked you to illustrate your presentation with tables and graphs (data visualization).

Questions:

1. How do the three portfolios compare to each other?
2. How do the three portfolios compare to the market in general? (Note: to find information about the "market in general" you can use the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 Index or some similar information.)
3. Which of the three funds are likely going to perform the best over the next 5-10 years?
4. Which two investments will you select? If you decide that none of them are a good investment, provide some alternatives.

Requirements: Prepare an memo to your supervisor (you may want to CC the CFO of BWC) answering the four questions above. The memo needs to include an attachment with extensive data analysis of the three funds and the market performance. Use the appropriate software (Excel or Tableau or similar) to perform this task.