Each project should include reports on two companies. One company should be from either the Chemicals & Allied Products industry or from the Pharmaceutical industry. The other company should be from...

Each project should include reports on two companies. One company should be from either the Chemicals & Allied Products industry or from the Pharmaceutical industry. The other company should be from either the Telecommunication industry or the Natural Gas Distribution industry.

There is no real deadline for the project. However, please advise me whether you plan to submit it so I will assign you a temporary grade which will be turned to a permanent grade after the final submission of the project. Please be advised that in previous years I have provided comments on the projects that resulted in several rounds of submissions and suggestions for revisions. .

Project 1
Computing the Systematic Risk (
b) for a Firm

For this project, students will compute the systematic risk coefficients of their selected companies, and whether the realized return corresponded to that risk. The computations should follow the discussions in class regarding risk and return, and should be based on monthly data during a period of at least 5 years which ends on November 30, 2020. The necessary data for this project include the following:

1. Monthly rates of return on the equities of the selected companies (available at
   https://finance.yahoo.com/) ;


2. Monthly rates of return on an appropriate
   cum-dividend
   market index (e.g., Standard and Poor’s 500 Index). An appropriate cum-dividend index is the S&P 500 Total Return Index. The returns on the adjusted closed prices of the ETF security whose ticker is SPY is a reasonable approximation.


3. Monthly rates of return on a risk-free asset (e.g., short-term Treasury Bills. Rates of return on Treasury securities are available at
   https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS1MO.

Students should collect this data for each month during the most recent 5-year period for which all the data is available.