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Udacity Business Analytics Nanodegree program is divided into 3 modules culminating in a project after each module.
- Introduction to Data
- Using SQL for Data Analysis
- Data Visualization in Tableau
This project Analyze NYSE Data follows the learning covered in the first module Introduction to Data.
Introduction
Kaggle’s New York Stock Exchange S&P 500 dataset
In this project, an analysis is made of real life data from the New York Stock Exchange drawing a subset of a large dataset provided by Kaggle that contains historical financial data from S&P 500 companies.
What do I need to install?
Any spreadsheet application could have been used including Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, etc. I have used Microsoft Excel.
Why this Project?
Going through the process of calculating summary statistics, drawing any inference from the statistics, calculating business metrics, and using models to forecast future growth prospects for the companies. The goal is to perform an analysis and also create visual tools to communicate the results in informative ways.
Used a clean data set for this project. Although in real-life scenarios, data sets often need to be cleaned and processed before analysis can proceed. This project allows to see what a clean data set should look like.
Background:
Used the Fundamentals.csv and Securities.csv files provided by Kaggle. The Fundamentals file provides the fundamental financial data gathered from SEC 10K annual filings from 448 companies listed on the S&P 500 index. The Securities file provided the industry or sector information the companies are categorized under on the S&P 500 index.
What skills will I use?
The main goal of this project is to demonstrate ability to:
- interpret the measures of central tendency and spread (mean, median, standard deviation, range).
- use a combination of Excel or Google Sheets functions (e.g., IF statements, INDEX, and MATCH, calculating descriptive statistics with the IF statement, dropdowns, data validation, VLOOKUP).
- analyze and forecast financial business metrics using Excel or Google Sheets.
- create visualizations of a business metric and use Excel or Google Sheets to create a financial forecast model.
If you are not a developer, I would suggest LivePlan business plan software by Palo Alto Software.
