STATS Assignment

This assignment requires a considerable amount of computer work and written comment. You may need to seek guidance from your tutor along the way. Do not leave things until too late. Each question carefully describes what you are required to do, so please follow these carefully.

In this assignment, you will examine data from a financial investment service that is conducting an evaluation of a list of American general stock funds so that it can make purchase recommendations to potential advisors. The investment service wants to summarise the characteristics of the data and examine some features of these funds based on fee structure (no fee vs fee payment), objective (growth vs blend fund), and capitalisation size of companies making up a fund’s portfolio (large, mid, or small).

The data collected is contained in a file called ‘ fund s .xls ’ and the columns of the file contain the following information:

Before you begin any analysis you must take a random sample of 120 funds from the 194 provided in the file fund s.xls . Use the Random Sample Generator 08 to do this. Your tutor will show you how this can be done using Excel. Your answers to the assignment tasks below are to be based on your sample of 120 funds. Make sure you keep a safe copy of your sample, since you cannot use Random Sample Generator 08 to reproduce the first sample.

To prepare your data file ready for analysis, you must take the following steps:

1. Use the file Random Sample Generator 08 to generate a random sample of 120 funds from the file fund s.xls .
2. Copy your sample file to another spreadsheet for working on your assignment and save it is another file name.
3. Now you are ready to use your sample data to complete the assignment tasks listed below.

For each task below, you must submit all of the required printouts, graphs, tables, and 5-number summaries required. Each graph and table should have a heading and each axis should have a label.

1. Provide a printout of the data in your sample (in alphabetical order of fund name). [1 mark]
2. Draw an appropriate graph of the variable ‘Size’. Discuss what it shows. [3 marks]
3. Obtain some basic descriptive statistics as well as a histogram and a boxplot of the total year-to-date return. Briefly describe the shape and central location for the distribution of the return. [ 7 marks]
4. Obtain comparative summary statistics (mean, median, standard deviation etc) for the year-to-date return for each type of fund objective. Produce a side-by-side boxplot that visually depicts the relationship between the type of fund objective and returns. Comment upon any differences or other points of interest you observe from the boxplots and summary statistics. [6 marks]
5. Prepare a contingency table (cross-classification table) using the Pivot Table option in Excel that compares the size of the funds with the type of fee structure and fund objective. You may use counts or percentages as the basis of comparison. Compare any similarities or differences among the sizes for the different types of funds. [ 4 marks]
6. Obtain a scatterplot of the year-to-date return and the NAV. Place the NAV on the horizontal axis. Comment briefly on the information provided by this graph, noting any unusual features, if any. [4 marks]
7. Regression Analysis
   1. Use the Excel Data Analysis Add-In to carry out a regression analysis on two variables: NAV (independent variable) and year-to-date return (dependent variable). Copy the output into your assignment and use it to determine the answer to the following questions. [2 marks]
   2. State the regression equation. [1 mark]
   3. State the R-squared value and the standard error and explain what they mean with respect to the data. [3 marks]
   4. Write down the value of the gradient of the regression line and explain what it means in this case. [ 3 marks]
   5. Is the constant or intercept value significant in this case? How do you know this?
      [2 marks]
   6. Briefly explain why you think this regression model is, or is not, a good model.

[2 marks]

1. Using the information obtained for your analyses, write a short conclusion about what you found about the year-to-date return and any related variables. [2 marks]

Price: $27.32

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 16 pages, 1132 words and 8 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document