In the recent past, the industry of wealth management has seen a lot of growth. Every individual or business actively searches for opportunities to get the maximum returns. However, in most of the cases, they either lack the skills to identify the right investment opportunity, or there is a shortage of time for finding these opportunities. Hence, this gave rise to the dedicated individuals who perform this task on behalf of the investors for a commission - Portfolio managers.

A portfolio manager makes investment decisions and carries out other related activities on behalf of vested investors. They work with a team of analysts and researchers, and their main objective is to realise the needs of the investor and suggest a suitable portfolio that meets all the expectations. They are responsible for establishing the best investment strategy, selecting appropriate investments along with the right allocation. However, in doing so, they face a lot of competition in the form of other portfolio managers and rival firms. Therefore, the portfolio manager has to use the available resources to provide the best solution to the investor.

Consider yourself working for an associate at an investment firm that manages accounts for private clients. Your role requires you to analyse a portfolio of stocks to provide consultation on investment management based on client’s requirement.

Your task is to provide consultation to two different investors, Mr Patrick Jyenger and Mr Peter Jyenger based on their requirements and financial objectives. You must perform the required steps for both the individuals after understanding the investor persona independently.

• You must use the elements of technical analysis to understand the trend of the underlying stocks. The metrics associated with risk and returns must help you realise whether the security meets the criteria of your investor’s financial goals.
• You must use the metrics and the visualisations to compare the performance of the available securities against each other, and also against the market index, S&P500.
• The findings should be aligned with the investor persona to select the appropriate stocks for the portfolio.
• After the selection of stocks, the portfolio must be validated using the active investment strategy to estimate the prices in future. You must check if the portfolio has the potential to fulfil the financial goals set by the investor.

You can download the data from the provided link below.

Stock Ticker Files

You are provided with the following information for 24 stocks of leading companies listed in New York Stock Exchange(NYSE):

• Date
• Open price: Price of stock at the start of the day
• Close price: Price of stock at the end of the day
• High price: Highest price reached by the stock on that day
• Low price: Lowest price reached by the stock on that day
• Adjusted close price: Stock price adjusted to include the annual returns (dividends) that the company offers to the shareholders
• Volume traded: Number of stocks traded on the day
• The information for every stock ranges from 1st October 2010 to 30th September 2020.

The stocks belong to different domains:

• Technology/IT
• Travel/Aviation/Hospitality
• Banking/Financial Services and Insurance
• Pharmaceuticals/Healthcare/Life Sciences

To help you with the market benchmark, you are given the S&P 500 index prices for the same period.

After developing an understanding of the problem statement and the dataset, it is important to think about your approach to solve the problem. The previous segment helped you with the broad overview of the steps, but now, you will hear about each task in detail. The entire capstone can be divided into the following aspects:

1. Preliminary Steps - Data loading
2. Data Exploration
3. Stock Analysis and Portfolio Management
4. Reporting

Under preliminary steps, you are expected to load the entire data into the working environment (Python). The entire data must be merged into a single dataframe with only the required columns. Most importantly, you must ensure that you can identify the company and the industry from the collated data for company-specific and industry analysis.

As part of exploration, you must create interactive visualisation dashboards and evaluate the performance metrics that help in summarising the stock. Here, you can use any of the visualisation tools like Tableau, Plotly, Python, etc., however, the final outcome should reflect all the points mentioned in the video. Moreover, the findings should be backed by your understanding of the concept or the facts from the industry.

As part of this task, you must execute your responsibilities as the portfolio manager. You must use the information about the investor to create a profile, and use it along with the obtained results to create a portfolio of stocks that have the potential to meet the financial goals of both the investors.

Hint: As part of the active investment strategy, try to replicate the daily gains/returns from the past 5 years over the future to predict the value of the selected stocks.

Post the analysis, you must summarise all the findings, insights, visuals and recommendations in the form of an executive report to your investor. Your report must also provide the features of the investors based on the information provided. Moreover, you are also expected to share a video presenting all the information to the investors.

You will need to submit the following documents for this capstone project:

• A clean version of the final dataset.
• A well commented Jupyter notebook containing entire work.
• A file containing a dashboard with all the important visualisations used in this project.
• A PPT file with an executive summary containing your understanding of the investor, insights and recommended steps of action for the investors.
• A video explaining the presentation: As the portfolio manager, you are expected to share a video presentation that you will share with the investors.