To complete this assignment I had to research the current stock prices from the 50 stock samples from the previous Project III. I then had to research another complete listing of 500 stock prices and select a data sample of 30 to represent that population of data. From there I had to compute the mean and standard deviation of the sample prices of the stocks. I then created a histogram to show the frequency distribution of the stock price data of my sample. I finally utilized the five steps of hypothesis testing in an attempt to prove my hypothesis regarding the mean of two stock indices. My findings are as follows:.
Sample Selection.
I first determined that I would utilize data from the 500 companies that comprise the NASDAQ 500 Stock Index. I gathered this information from the NASDAQ.com web site. I placed this downloaded listing of information into an Excel spreadsheet in alphabetical order. (See Appendix A) In order to view the full listing of 500, you will need to double click on the embedded Excel image and use the scroll bar to see the list in its entirety. To choose my sample of 30 companies, I utilized the Excel function of "=RAND()" to assign random numbers to each of the 500 companies on my list. I then selected all 500 companies with their random numbers and applied the sort function of Excel in ascending order based on the random number. I then took the first 30 companies from the list to perform further calculations on for the purposes of this project. .
Data Compilation & Statistic Calculation .
I then had to research the individual current stock prices of each of the 50 companies from my sample data from Project III as well as my 30 companies from my sample data from this project. (See Appendix B) I obtained this data from the DailyStocks.com web site on November 24th, 2003. Therefore, the stock prices are current as of that day. I placed each of these stock prices into my spreadsheet respectively, as is evident from Appendix B.