Unit 1

For this practical application assignment, you will download five years of daily adjusted closing price and volume data from Yahoo Finance (or another site of your choosing) and perform a descriptive analysis. You will be using this data for four modules in this course.

1. Go to Yahoo! Finance, linked in Resources. 
2. Find a stock beginning with the first letter of your last name. For example, if your last name begins with F, you might choose Ford.
3. Search your chosen stock. When you find it, click on the Historical Data tab to access historical stock price.
4. Gather five years of daily adjusted stock price data by selecting the appropriate dates through the Time Period link. Be sure the end date includes days in this course.
5. Click on the Download Data link to save the data to your computer. The file will be saved so that it can be opened in Excel.

Conduct a descriptive analysis by doing (at a minimum) the following:

1. Calculate the mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation of the adjusted daily closing price for this stock. Interpret these statistics and discuss their relevance. Is the mode useful? Why or why not?
2. Produce a histogram for the adjusted daily closing price. Be sure you have enough bins, so that you can see the shape of the data. Describe the shape of the data. What does this tell you about the stock?
3. Produce a boxplot for the adjusted daily closing price. Interpret it. Note: this may be problematic for some of you who are using Excel. You may produce it manually if you cannot generate it automatically.
4. Produce a time plot (scatter plot) of the closing date versus the stock price. How has the stock trended over time? Are there patterns?
5. Summarize what descriptive analysis revealed about the adjusted daily closing stock price.