1. In January, 70-year bonds that the government had sold in October tumbled more than 10 percent in price in just over two weeks. However, in the past month the debt has bounced back 10 per cent.
2. The return distribution for Portfolio A is slightly negatively skewed. Portfolio B's distribution is moderately positively skewed.
3. Portfolio A's return distribution is mesokurtic, and Portfolio B's return distribution is slightly platykurtic.
4. Portfolio B has a higher mean return and moderately positive skewness, but it also has more risk as measured by standard deviation of return.
5. The setting of a useful value for k (number of intervals) often involves inspecting the data and exercising judgement. How much details should we include? If we use too few intervals, we will summarise too much and lose pertinent characteristics. If we use too many intervals, we may not summarise enough.
6. Qlik Technologies' P/E of approximately 205 tremendously influences the value of the portfolio's arithmetic mean P/E. The mean P/E also misleadingly suggests an orientation to stocks with high P/Es. The median P/E of 13.94 appears to better represent the central tendency of the P/Es. Extreme P/E values need to be investigated and handled with care. For reasons related to this example, analysts often use the median of price multiples to characterise the valuation of industry groups.
7. The geometric mean return of 0 percent accurately reflects that the ending value of the investment in Year 2 equals the starting value in Year 1. The compounding rate of return on the investment is 0 percent. The arithmetic mean return reflects the average of the one-year returns.
8. Labor force is the numerator in the participation ratio and denominator in the unemployment rate.Therefore, assuming all else remains unchanged, an increase in the number of people included in the labor force would cause the participation ratio to increase and unemployment rate to decrease.
