Two long-time competitors, Freddie's Market and Greta's Groceries, recently issued an announcement stating their decision to merge. The statement claimed that the new company would have more financial resources, which would enable it to expand services and broaden offerings to customers. This proposed merger is an example of a horizontal merger.

a) true

b) false

Monthly price data for mdltx and ekwax from yahoo finance is contained in the excel spreadsheet for this exercise. there are 37 months of price data for the period from september 2009 to september 2012. (note: these prices already incorporate dividend payments.) the 36 monthly returns for each fund are also provided. calculate average (arithmetic) monthly return and standard deviation for each fund. you can use the excel functions average, stdev to derive these stats. annualize these statistics. use the correl function in excel to derive the correlation coefficient between the two sets of returns. (annual correlation is the same as monthly correlation. hence, no need to annualize this stat.) using the annualized statistics derived in step 1, compute the expected return and standard deviation for portfolios containing from 0% to 100% mdltx (and 100% to 0% ekwax) by 10% increments. graph the resulting portfolios. based on your analysis, is there any potential benefit to diversification across these two funds? explain. of the 11 portfolios you graphed, which are efficient?