This assignment is a group activity. Cases involving the use of Microsoft Excel to analyze business data will be assigned. You will need to submit the excel sheet that contains the workings of your case on Bright Space in addition to a brief Microsoft Word report describing your workings and results. The application cases will not only be graded on the correctness of the final answer, but also on the explanation provided by students with respect to the different decisions that they took to arrive at the answer. These cases are aimed to illustrate the use of the analytical tools learned in the class for day-to-day business activities. Individual rubrics will be provided with each assignment. Only MS Excel and MS Word files will be accepted. Please reformat into these formats before submitting your response.

Find 15 firms of an industry of your choice listed on the NYSE. The information is in the public domain and will require you to find the data. Use Yahoo financials to pull the data.

1. Track the performance of their stocks over the last 5 years of monthly data (track stock prices) using appropriate visual tools

2. Calculate the descriptive statistics for each of the firms and the aggregate industry using the appropriate excel tools

3. Which of these firms would you invest in and why? Give the top 5 based on the information that you have gathered and other information from newspapers, periodicals, firm websites etc. Remember, your investment decision is affected by the rewards and risks associated with the returns

4. Do you see any trends in the data vis--vis the stock markets? Use tools such as Gap-minder to create visualizations as you see fit