Today is March 30, 2020, and you have just started your new job with a financial planning firm. You have been asked to review a portion of a clients stock portfolio to determine the risk/return profiles of 12 stocks in the portfolio. Unfortunately, your small firm cannot afford the expensive databases that would provide all this information with a few simple keystrokes, but thats why they hired you. Specifically, you have been asked to determine the monthly average returns and standard deviations for the 12 stocks for the past six years. In the following chapters, you will be asked to do more extensive analyses on these same stocks.

The stocks (with their symbols in parentheses) 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)

1. Using the annual statistics, create an Excel plot with standard deviation (volatility) on the x-axis and average return on the y-axis as follows:
   1. Create three columns on your spreadsheet with the statistics you created in Questions 3 and 4 for each of the individual stocks and the equally weighted portfolio. The first column will have the ticker, the second will have annual standard deviation, and the third will have the annual mean return.
   2. Highlight the data in the last two columns (standard deviation and mean), choose Insert>Chart>XY Scatter Plot. Complete the chart wizard to finish the plot.
2. What do you notice about the volatilities of the individual stocks, compared to the volatility of the equally weighted portfolio?