RISK, RETURN, AND STOCK VALUATION
Virtual Stock Exchange Project
Module 3 SLP Assignment

Make 3 Stock Purchases, Provide Information about the Purchases, and Calculate and Interpret
the Standard Deviation
Please download the Module 3 SLP template. You will type your answer into this Excel workbook. When
finished with the SLP assignment, please save the document with your last name and submit to the
dropbox.
1. Purchase 7 and 8: Buy stock in two companies that have returns that are inversely related. In
other words, you might choose to buy stock in a company that does well when oil prices rise and
one that does poorly when oil prices rise. You must explain this in the spreadsheet in the field
“Reason for Buying.”
2. Purchase 9: Buy a stock that has countercyclical returns. In other words, its returns are inversely
related to the business cycle.
You are free to make additional purchases, but you only need to explain the reasoning behind your
required purchases 7 through 9.
3. You will need to include the following information for each stock in this workbook:
o
Company Name
o
Ticker Symbol
o
Reason for Buying
4. In addition to making these purchases and recording the above information, you will need to
calculate the mean and standard deviation of the daily stock price for TWO of your required
stock purchases for the last year. The historical stock price can be downloaded from
finance.yahoo.com. Once you have searched on the company, using the ticker symbol, you can
select the “Historical Data” tab. Click on “Download Data.” You will copy and paste this
information into the SLP template and calculate the mean and standard deviation for the “Adj
Close” price.
Once you have downloaded the data and calculated the mean and standard deviation for both stocks,
you will answer the following additional questions in the template:
5. Based on the standard deviation alone, can you make any conclusions about the relative risk of
the two stocks?
6. Given the risk, what can you say about the relative expected return of the two stocks?
Video to assist with assignment: https://youtu.be/TXJVS7hRjns

Answer the assignment questions directly.

Stay focused on the precise assignment questions. Do not go off on tangents or devote a lot of
space to summarizing general background materials.

For computational problems, make sure to show your work and explain your steps.

For short answer/short essay questions, make sure to reference your sources of information
with both a bibliography and in-text citations.