Financial Portfolio Selection using Multi-factor Capital Asset Pricing Model and Importing Options Data

Diversification and portfolio selection is an integral part of finance teaching. In this study, multi-factor Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is estimated for components of Dow Jones Composite Index using data from Yahoo! Finance. Along with CAPM's Beta, other statistics are calculated that are common decision criteria for portfolio selection such as historic standard deviation (total risk), total return, average daily return, Sharpe and Treynor measures. Two new commands are introduced, components and portfolio, that automate the entire process. A third new command, fetchyahoooptions, is provided to download and parse equity options data from Yahoo! Finance web pages and, optionally, to calculate the implied volatilities for the downloaded options