You have recently completed a Bachelor of Business degree through the College of Business, Law and Governance at James Cook University (JCU) and have been appointed as a junior member in an asset management firm in Singapore. This is your first full time position and you are on probation for three months. You feel a little anxious but you are keen to make a good impression in order to secure your position. It is Monday morning of your second week in the position. On arrival your boss calls you into her office. Before she hands over some project to you, your boss wants to understand how familiar you are with statistical knowledge and skills. She gives you a dataset of stocks listed in the U.S. market. The data contain the firm information in Dec 2020. You need to utilise your statistical knowledge to describe and summarise the data. More importantly, you need to identify the factors affecting stock returns and give your recommendations for investors in the U.S. stock market. Your boss asks you to complete the report within three days. More specifically, she asks you to: 

1. Randomly select 400 companies from the given data set and do the following analysis based on this sample of 400 companies. 

2. Identify the variables and their types and scales of measurement. Is the data time series or cross sectional? Please explain. 

3. Provide a table in which you summarise the complete descriptive statistics on ‘stock return’ and ‘firm size’ (including but NOT limited to measures of central location, measures of variability, coefficient of variation (where applicable), etc.). 

4. Prepare two bar charts to graphically represent the frequency distribution of stock exchanges and of industries. 

5. Develop tables to provide joint information on: a. Stock exchanges and average stock return. b. Different industries and average stock return. 

6. Graphically demonstrate the output of Question 5. 

7. Provide a scatter plot and correlation analysis for a. Stock return and firm size 2 b. Stock return and past return c. Stock return and past trading volume What insights can be gained from these analyses? 

8. Are your results consistent with the research findings in the related literature? What are your recommendations to investors in the U.S. stock market?

PERMNO	stock ID
Company name	company name
Exchange	stock exchange, 1 is for NYSE, 2 for AMEX and 3 for NASDAQ
Stock return	stock return in %
Firm size	firm size in millions of USD
Past return	stock return in % in past month
Past trading volume	trading volume in millions of USD in past month
Industry code	industry code
Industry name	industry name

Report Structure for BU1007

All written assignments must follow specific structures that allow the document to be easily read and understood. A formal report should contain the following sections, in the order given. Some sections are NOT REQUIRED in the report for BU1007 as noted below.

1. Assignment cover sheet
2. Title page
3. Table of contents
4. Introduction
5. Body of report: Data & methodology, and results
6. Conclusions and recommendations
7. List of references based on the APA format (if applicable)

Details of these parts are as follows.

1. Assignment cover sheet

You can download the assignment cover sheet from the assessment folder at LearnJCU.

2. Title page

Please give a title to your report. The title is based on your own thoughts but please make it relevant to your report.

3. Table of contents

The table of contents should be listed on a separate page of the report. Sections are listed in the order in which they appear in the report and the corresponding page numbers should be shown.

4. Introduction

The introduction has three parts:

• Purpose of the report: tell the reader why the report is being produced.
• The scope of the report: summarise what the report covers, how information will be presented in the report, where the information for the report comes from and how it will be gathered (e.g. questionnaires or other research). Be careful here once again not to simply reproduce the table of contents; this should be an overview or summary of what will be done, not a bit-by-bit reproduction. Focus on the important elements.
• Limitations: any limitations encountered in the production of the report that may affect the results of the report

5. Body of report

The structure of the body of the report is directed by the assessment item. You should include data & methodology and main results in the body of report. Consider the case questions and structure this section using headings and subheadings to convey the report content.

6. Conclusions

This section should essentially summarise the main points or findings of the report. It should be based on the information presented in the body. It is essential that you do not introduce any new information or ideas at this stage and the use of direct quotations should be avoided. The conclusion should answer the question: what do the findings mean? You can also compare your findings with those of others in order to see if they are consistent. If not, you may need to figure out some possible reasons.

It is important to ensure that your conclusions are consistent with the outline given in the introduction. For this reason, it is generally recommended that the introduction be written after the main report. The conclusion should answer the following questions: Was the purpose of the report fulfilled? Have the specified sources of information been used? Have the areas stated been adequately tackled?

7. References

If you have cited other studies in your report, you need to follow the APA referencing to list the references. If you haven’t cited any study, there is no need for you to list any reference.