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Portfolio theory
An investor has a certain amount of dollars to invest into two stocks IBM and TEXACO. A portion of the available funds will be invested into IBM (denote this portion of the funds with xA and the remaining funds into TEXACO (denote it with xB) - so xA + xB = 1. The resulting portfolio will be xARA + xBRB, where RA is the monthly return of IBM and RB is the monthly return of TEXACO. The goal here is to find the most efficient portfolios given a certain amount of risk. Using market data from January 1980 until February 2001 we compute that $E(R_A)=0.010$, $E(R_B)=0.013$, $Var(R_A)=0.0061$, $Var(R_B)=0.0046$, and $Cov(R_A,R_B)=0.00062$. \\ We first want to minimize the variance of the portfolio. This will be: