Suppose you are buying one asset and shorting another asset (and the dollar value of the purchase and the short are the same). The standard deviation of this portfolio will be minimized if the two assets are:

In terms of the "great wheel of science", statistics are central to the research process (a) only between the hypothesis phase and the observation phase (b) only between the observation phase and the empirical generalization phase (c) only between the theory phase and the hypothesis phase (d) only between the empirical generalization phase and the theory phase