You are a team of professional researchers from a prestigious fund management company. Your task is to identify the factors that may be crucial in forecasting stock returns of public listed companies. Please take note that you are required to write a report containing justifications on the selection of factors and companies. The content should include:

1) Introduction: Critically discuss 5 journal research papers that empirically tested different factors (macro or micro-economically or global influences) that have influencing the returns of companies.

2) Methodology: Select four influencing factors that are influencing in Malaysian context. Then, select 5 Malaysian public listed companies (same/different industry) from Bursa Malaysia. You are required to provide justifications for the selection of the factors and the companies. Collect the monthly prices for the five companies and compute their returns. Additionally, collect data for the four (4) influencing factors that your group has selected. (Data can be collected from any reliable source such as Yahoo Finance, Investing, Bank Negara). Please take note that stock return data should be in monthly frequency while for the four influencing factors, the data might be monthly or yearly depends on the availability. The period of analysis must be 5 years (most recent years). Using data analysis feature in Excel, you are required to compute a multiple regression (using 300 observations) for the returns of the companies (dependent variables) and the selected four influencing factors (independent variables).

3) Analysis and discussion: Write about your findings and discuss about whether your findings are consistent with the previous empirical researches that you mentioned in step 1. Illustrate your findings using graphs and/or tables.

4) Conclusion: Conclude your report by discussing how this research and findings may assist you in making investment decision.